Audrey

Moonstone Woman (1)

The moonstone woman combs her hair

Sightless before birth

By the brightness of her own

A crack is heard, from a nearby vase

Water cascades down the long stairs

Where it reaches the bottom of a dark, violet pit

Lighting this loneliness,

From the edges of the earth

The crouching dog is seen

She will one day go beyond her tower 

Passing through the corridor of merging clouds 

Being led by lidless fish

But now, the taste of sour fruit sits on her tongue

As she combs the moonlight

Sitting, with her eroded hair

-Translated from Japanese by Audrey

Moonstone Woman (2)

The woman of moonstone combed her hair

Before born, she was blind

Because of the brightness of her own

The sound of a jar cracks

And water flows down the long staircase

Into the bottom of a dark and violet pit

Light the loneliness

From corners of the horizon

And the crouching dog appears

The woman will escape her tower

Crossing the hall of gathering clouds

Being led by fish with no eyelids

The sour fruit sits in her mouth

While she combs the light of the moon

Sitting, with her eroded hair.

-Translated from Japanese by Audrey

Translator’s Statement

Chimako Tada was born in 1930 in Fukuoka, Japan. She spent most of her childhood in Tokyo where she would later study French Literature at the Tokyo Women's Christian University. In 1954, she joined Mitei, a magazine by poets and writers in the Japanese avant-garde. Her first book of poems, Hanabi, was published in 1956. Her poems were both contemporary and classical showing her flow between the two poetry forms. She also included many Japanese, Chinese, Latin, and Greek literature as references in them. Later she moved in with her husband and translated French poems (with the use of her French literature study) and wrote her own Japanese poems too. She later went on to teach about Japanese literature, poetry, and religion and then died in 2003.

The poem I chose to translate by Chimako is “Moonstone Woman,” published in 1986, in Tokyo. From the first read, it is a very abstract poem, about a woman made of moonstone. At first, it is hard to understand and seems like just a poem with nonsensical stanzas and lines. It has some end rhymes in the first few stanzas but stopped in the middle, and it uses old Japanese words, phrases, and Kanji.

When it came to translating, it was difficult for both me and my translation mentor, my mom. The combination of old Japanese and abstract meanings made it confusing to translate. We used a mixture of Romanized Japanese (that we translated into Google) and using the internet to try and figure out what the lines and words actually mean. An example of this is the word “u” or “甕” in the first line of the second stanza. It is a very uncommon use for a vase or sometimes an urn, and the Kanji for it turns out to be used mainly in Chinese. Other times, when we try to figure out a word there are multiple meanings to it. To negate this problem, when I was making my interpretive meaning poems, I decided which meaning of the word I liked better depending on how I wanted the translation to go. This word, “大地” means horizon, earth, ground, and other similar words, but I felt that “corners of the Earth” flowed better with the story I wanted in the first translation, and the “horizon” for the second one was used because I wanted to stick with the literal meaning of the poem more in that one. I did this with other words too, just picking what sounds better for the particular translation. This quote from this article really conveys what these two different translations I made mean: “Words always have the potential to exceed what we intend for them, even when we’re all speaking the same language” (del Valle Schorske). Both my translations are still the same language and almost all the words are the same, but they mean different things, and each person who reads them will probably also read it differently. The words I wrote for my translations are just words, but they can go beyond that depending on who is reading them. I still don’t totally understand what my poem is about, but some other people may take on a whole other meaning to it that I did not intend, but that is sort of the purpose of poetry anyway.

Lastly, I made a “blackout” poem about my experiences with the language I translated:  Japanese. This blackout poem is a poem formed by the words and text used in an interview with my mom and an additional article. Interviewing my mom was probably the most difficult part of this project because the questions I needed to ask were things we did not think about. The interview is about heritage languages and their relations with us now, and for me and my family, Japanese is very much part of our culture. It is not something we have to think about from an outside perspective because it is just how our life is. This caused us to ask the question: what is culture? I took the text of my interview with her and then blacked out anything that I did not want to create a poem. I wanted the poem to have a clear beginning, middle, and end, so I started by talking about how I am Japanese, went on to answer the question of culture, and ended with an article about Japanese culture in America. This poem to me is about how living in America as Japanese is, and how my culture is slowly becoming just a part of American culture. The final thing my poem needed was an artistic part, I used the negative space of my black-out poem to create the silhouette of a Japanese flag and a heart, very fitting.

Bibliography

“About Tada Chimako.” Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/tada-chimako. Accessed 24 April 2023.

Kangling, Chen. “Why is Japanese culture popular in US?” Global Times, 14 October 2014, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/886239.shtml. Accessed 24 April 2023.

“MOONSTONE FIRE - Chimako Tada - Japan.” Poetry International, https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-18204_MOONSTONE-FIRE#lang-org. Accessed 24 April 2023.

Del Valle Schorske, Carina. “Letter of Recommendation: Translation.” The New York Times, 26 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-translation.html. Accessed 25 May 2023.

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Audrey is a 16-year-old girl who enjoys staying in bed and watching cheesy and cringe movies and shows. When she is not doing this, she can be found drawing or painting in her room and listening to music.