100 Poets : Set #8 : Sosei Hoshi

Sosei Hoshi

Most of my yearly sets of 10 'Hyaku-nin Isshu' poets have only one religious member, but as there are 13 such men included in the 100, three of my sets must have two, so here is our second priest of the year, the Monk Sosei. I have been a bit curious why these 13 are all male; Teika failed to include any females who had taken religious orders. We read in our history books of many Heian-era women who became nuns, and presumably some of those must have been well-known poetesses. Perhaps it was somehow felt not quite acceptable to include love poems written by nuns, even though there are plenty of them written by priests; written, I suppose, before they left the 'cares' of this world behind them ...

I found the English translations of this month's poem quite interesting. Here are two of them:

'Yes, I'll soon be with you,'
Were your very words, and yet,
On that September night
The moon came at dawn
Without you.

She promised me to come here soon,
And eager I await her call,
Yet who comes but the morning moon?
And oh, no sight of her at all.

As is common with poetry of this type, it is not obvious when reading the original Japanese as to 'who is doing what to whom'. In this poem, one person has promised to visit during the night, but the other has waited in vain until dawn ... for nobody came. But which is the man, and which the woman? Who broke their promise, he or she? On my desk in front of me at the moment, I have eight translations of this poem, three by Japanese translators, and five by Westerners. I find it very interesting that in three of these translations (2 by a Japanese, one by an Englishman) the gender is left unclear, as in the original. In the other five (one by a Japanese, 4 by Englishmen and Americans) it is very clear - she made a promise to come, and he waited until morning alone ... In none of the eight translations is it stated that it was a man who was making the visit.

I suspect that the five translators who created this image of a man waiting all night, did so because they were influenced by the fact that the poem was written by a man; they assumed that the poem was autobiographical, and that he was telling of his own experience. They thought that he had waited until morning one long night ... But do you really think that it was likely that a woman would make such a nocturnal trip? I find it rather unrealistic that a Heian-era woman in flowing kimono would flit through the dark and dangerous streets on the way to such an assignation. And actually, even here in our own Heisei-era it seems to me far more likely that the night-time 'visitor' would be a man ... This is just chauvinism on my part though. I don't really know too much about former Japanese cultural patterns, and maybe it was common practice back then.

Just think. If Shakespeare had written his play this way, it would have been Romeo standing up there on the balcony, and Juliet creeping around the garden ...

October 1996

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