2008-06-30 - 1:35 p.m.
Monk Fight
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Though I am jealous of Royall Tyler's (thoroughly impressive-sounding) name, his Harvard education, and the fact that he was the pet student of none other than Donald Keene (who, for those of you have forgotten, is the cybernetic-composite robot bringing Japanese literature to Western audiences) and though I am grateful that Royall Tyler's work drew my attention to a man by the name of Ariwara no Narihira who was like a Japanese Don Juan, I'm also convinced that my book of Japanese folk tales would be better than his.
No disrespect intended.
One, because Royall used very different sources for his translations than I use for mine and my sources are, quite frankly, better. Royall's book uses, as much as possible, original sources. That is, extremely old documents from way back in the day when literacy was rare enough to be precious and thus, it was almost exclusively important people who were written about. And by important people, I mean rich and/or politically influential people and/or notorious monks. I can barely read Japanese, and I definitely cannot read antiquated texts, which is, I think, working out just fine. My sources are books compiled by PTA committees and folk tale clubs. That is, local grandpas and grandmas. Whereas Royall's book wound up with a glut of monk and princess stories, my collection of folk tales is steadily turning out to be the complete opposite. I've got a glut of stories about farmers and other ordinary people as well as a lot of how-things-came-to-be stories with very few stories about monks and samurais, which I think is more interesting to more people.
Two, because Royall doesn't know when to stop being a scholar. Here, I think that the lessons I learned from Chaucer are serving me well. Royall probably has more interesting things to say about his folk tales than I do, but mine are more fun to read. Folk tales are what they are and sometimes they are cheesy. Royall's translations attempt to minimize the corniness of this genre, whereas I've decided to go with it. My translations are, I will admit, often stale - the same descriptive similes that any person who reads will have already read many times - but Royall's are cold. Sometimes I wonder if my translations are too corny, and this is where Chaucer comes in. Because it's possible to write this way with, and without, charm. And I think that Chaucer and I are charming.
Three, because Royall's book uses way too many proper names. This seems trivial, but I can't understand why he did it. A Western audience is going to gloss over the names of all but the most important character, and all but the biggest cities because these words have no meaning. Many of the tales in Royall's book are less than one page long - more like folk anecdotes than folk tales - still, overuse of proper names made his book strangely hard to read. This is a lesson I've learned from Royall and applied to my translations. Only the most important people and places get to have names. In most cases it's better for a mountain to simply be a mountain, a hunter to be a hunter, a young lady a young lady, and so on. Any audience will immediately recognize these, which is, I think, preferable to stumbling over irrelevant details.
In other words, if all my talk about folk tales has made you want more, I advise you wait a few years until (hopefully) I've learned to walk the walk and talk the talk and my folk tales will get published too. In the meantime, it's nice that somebody put this http://durendal.org:8080/jft/ online. Though I'm not prepared to go as cheesy as these are, I do appreciate the many goodly words that I've espied here.
