At the famous Kabuki Theater, Mike and I bought two bento boxes for carry-in lunch and tickets for the cheap fourth-floor balcony. The actors’ painted faces and stylized drama fascinated us for an hour or so until we fell asleep from jet lag fatigue.
Back at the hotel I called Burton Watson at the phone number he’d sent me, and we arranged our interview for mid-morning the next day. He did not want to meet at his apartment—“Too small, too far away,” he said—so he would meet us in the hotel lobby. Mike and I spent the rest of the day madly scouting nearby parks, cemeteries, museums, and temples for an elegant interview location. In the end, we settled on Mike’s least favorite option, our hotel room, the only suitably quiet place we could find in this noisy, crowded city.
At 5:20 a.m. the phone rang. It was Goto, his body restless with the same jet lag as ours, offering to take us to see the fish market. I told him we’d done that already, so he offered to take us to breakfast. I thanked him for his generous hospitality, and the enduring image of a cargo ship filled with wine, but today we must begin our trek on the path to Cold Mountain. As we signed off, not to see each other again, I mentioned my surprise at the intense humidity in Tokyo. “This is the best weather of the autumn season,” Goto answered. “Before you arrive, a hurricane. After you go, a hurricane. You have landed between two hurricanes. The gods are on your side.”
ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARCH-TRANSLATOR
After breakfast, Mike tested his cameras while I ordered an extra cup of tea. Mike was prepared. I was not. As a newspaper editorial writer for a decade, I had routinely interviewed major business, scientific, and political leaders without the slightest trepidation. But this was Dr. Burton Watson, preeminent translator and scholar who, at eighty years old, still produced elegant texts! What enduring work had I ever really done? Yes, I was in love with the sound and rhythm of Watson’s translations, but I understood little of China, Japan, Buddhism, or, really, of poetry, though I was helplessly seized in its grasp much of my life.
I paced the hotel lobby. Right on time, a slight American pushed slowly through the revolving entrance door. He was lightly stooped, bald with a large mole decorating his forehead, wearing black heavy-framed 1950s-style glasses. He had warm, watery brown eyes, full lips, and the soft, gentle voice of a shy man. I awkwardly shook his hand (I had imagined a bear hug!), and gingerly ushered him into the elevator to our room. After introducing him to Mike, I prepared three cups of green tea while Mike seated him in the corner chair and arranged the lapel microphone.
There were surprises all around. I showed him my cherished edition of his Cold Mountain, my responses chicken-scratched all over the margins. He showed us his two-volume manuscript of Cold Mountain’s poems, woodblock-printed in 1756, that he had purchased in 1956 at a bookstall in Kyoto. Stab-bound like my book dedicated to him, it held 303 poems, the vast majority attributed to Han-shan, the rest to his two friends, the Buddhist monk Feng-kan (Big Stick) and the foundling temple kitchenboy Shih-te (Pickup). The text was surrounded by extensive commentaries by Japanese Buddhist monks, who admired the eccentric and unpredictable Cold Mountain far more than Chinese Buddhist or Confucian scholars ever did.
He told us he fell in love with Chinese characters as a boy taking his parents’ shirts to the neighborhood Chinese laundry in suburban New York, fascinated by the mysterious written forms. He joined the navy at seventeen before finishing high school, and while stationed in Yokohama harbor in 1943 made many trips into that devastated city. After graduation from the Chinese program at Columbia on the GI Bill, he immediately booked ship’s passage back to Japan, seeking to get as close to China as the Cold War would allow. He landed in Japan in 1951, the occupation still under way. “Really,” he said, “American missionaries were the only non-military people supposed to be there, but somehow I came as a teacher of English to Kyoto.” He had left Japan infrequently ever since, including for a stint on the faculty at Columbia, which he fled when they wanted him to chair the department.
After finishing his PhD back at Columbia, he returned to Japan, part of the small expatriate community in Kyoto in the 1950s that included the poets Gary Snyder and Cid Corman, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, the pioneering American Zen practitioner who later became a priest. Unknown to Watson at the time, Snyder had already translated twenty-four of Han-shan’s poems as a graduate student at Berkeley (later published in Evergreen Review and in book form in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems).
A beginning poet himself in those days, Watson told us translating Han-shan’s poems became his first substantial undertaking. Watson worked for a time for Mrs. Sasaki at the First Zen Institute in Kyoto. When she read Arthur Waley’s translations of twenty Cold Mountain poems in Encounter in 1954, she asked Watson to seek out the originals.
Cid Corman readily agreed to help edit Watson’s early efforts at translation. “Cut this out, cut that out, this isn’t doing anything . . . get rid of the verbiage,” a confident Corman insisted to Watson’s amazement, as Corman knew no Chinese (nor Japanese!). But Watson felt his advice sound and edited accordingly.
Watson trusted Corman, I guessed, because Corman was a poet. Watson said he still tries to keep his ear attuned to American English by reading contemporary poetry. I asked him to read out loud to us some of his Cold Mountain translations. In doing so, his voice dropped into a deeply moving poetic cadence. “I should have known!” I exclaimed to myself. “He has a poet’s ear, that reverence for rhythm and sound. That explains the exceptional music of his translations.”
In describing his translation technique, Watson confirmed that thought. “I know what the Chinese character means and implies and so on,” he said. “And I can’t just make up some other thing. On the other hand, I have a certain amount of leeway. It’s what translators always say: because I’ve lost so much in other places, I should be allowed to make it up in places where I can . . . make it a little better than the original. So within those limits, I try to get the best language, the most vivid, effective—and the sound, of course, I’m always thinking of the sound. Some people apparently don’t pay much attention to the sound.”
He said he followed the Chinese form rigorously as well. “If it’s an eight-line poem I come out with an eight-line translation. Because the lineation is very pronounced in the Chinese. Now [Kenneth] Rexroth didn’t like that, so he runs it over into the next line. And [David] Hinton does the same, because he admires Rexroth. But the Chinese is so strong that it forces it on the English. . . . If you are going to use enjambment you have to enjamb every next line. I don’t know why Rexroth did that. He didn’t like end-stopped lines, but the Chinese form is very strong.”
I told him about the diplomat’s daughter at Takashimaya, who felt a tremendous conflict between the individuality she’d learned in the West and the conformity she felt living here. I wondered if that difference was part of the ungovernable Han-shan’s charm to America’s open-road ear? I remembered that Jack Kerouac wrote the novel The Dharma Bums after he and Allen Ginsberg visited Gary Snyder in Mill Valley, where Snyder was translating Han-shan for his Berkeley professor. America’s road scholar dedicated that book “to Han-shan.”
Watson confided that at a family gathering back in the States after his father’s death, he chose as a text a Han-shan poem. I asked him to read it to us.
COLD MOUNTAIN NO. 85
I came once to sit on Cold Mountain
And lingered here for thirty years.
Yesterday I went to see relatives and friends;