Two People (夜の二人)

    

Two People at Night

Our end will be death by starvation.

So it was prophesied by the rain falling softly on the snow that evening.

Chieko, although a woman of uncommon resolution, possesses a medieval dream,

Preferring death by fire at the stake to that of starvation.

We fall silent again, listening to the rain.

The wind seeming to pick up; as rose branches scratch at the windowpane.

 

 夜の二人

私達の最後が餓死であらうといふ予言は、

しとしとと雪の上に降る霙まじりの夜の雨の言つた事です。

智恵子は人並みはづれた覚悟のよい女だけれど

まだ餓死よりは火あぶりの方をのぞむ中世期の夢を持つてゐます。

私達はすつかり黙つてもう一度雨をきかうと耳をすましました。

少し風が出たと見えて薔薇の枝が窓硝子に爪を立てます。

 

(1926)

 

 

Comments

[marc]

I don't know if you wanted everyone to try their hand at this, but if not, don't publish it, and just keep it ご参考までに. I rearranged it a bit to have mainly four-foot lines.

Nocturne

That we would meet our end by starving
was foretold by the sleet-mixed rain
that fell quietly on the snow that night.
Chieko is a woman of uncommon resolution,
but she dreams medievally of death by fire,
and not starvation. We fell silent,
and went back to listening to the rain.
A gust seemed to rise, and the rose branches
scratched at the window.

[peony]

Marc-- you did it again! I like the "she dreams medievally"...
That is a wonderful image. I like that a lot. I think I sometimes dream medievally too. Thanks so much for showing me your version 多謝！！！！　Hopefully it won't keep me up at night like Karakuri Uta did :)

[Jan Walls]

Once again, beautifully rendered! Any particular reason why you choose "uncommon resolution" rather than "uncommon enlightenment"? Also, you might want to consider "claw at the window pane" just to capture the image of "爪"? ..... or not. Love it anyway.

[peony]

Thanks, Jan!!!

Isn't this poem interesting? It was written with Joan of Arc in mind, I think.... You can see the Medieval European sensibility of preferring being burned at the stake and her "uncommon resolution"--like Joan of Arc.

Maybe in contrast to 悟り which involves spiritual work/path, Kotaro is talking of Chieko's personality. Like "pluck" or "courage" to plot and lead people into battle...Kotaro seemed to really love her "childlike innocence" and at the same time her uncommon "courage" to go against the grain and continually praised these things in his poems... Reading now and knowing how she went so totally insane, one wonders if stress at being childlike but at the same time maybe feeling some pressure to go against the grain and be modern and Western didn't drive her over the edge?

I was thinking of maybe changing the penultimate line to:
Listening to the rain, we fall silent again

[Jan Walls]

I think you may be right about the allusion to Joan of Arc. Still, the use of けれど at the end of line 3 makes me wonder: since "uncommon resolution" seems to be a positive trait already, and the medieval preference to burn at the stake over dying of starvation is both romantic and heroic, why the "although"? It seems to me that "Although Chieko is a fine woman of unusual enlightenment", she clings to a medieval dream....." But of course this may be just an unenlightened 変な外人's 変な解説, so don't lose any sleep over it. お休み yourself!

[S. Peralta]

Leanne, love this poem and the way you translated it! I agree, Joan of Arc was likely an inspiration for this. At your invitation (and because there's already another version posted here!) here is my own rendition, which you've seen before, more an adaptation than a translation, of course:

---
Two By Night

after Kotaro Takamura

The end, when it comes for us, will be by famine:
The night rained soft this sleet-rune divination on the snow.

Undaunted, you hold fast your medieval resolution:
Not famine, no; you’d rather be consumed by fire.

Silently, we listen for the rain’s riposte.
The wind rises, scrawling rose-branch portents on the glass.

---

A few points:

My poetic breakthrough came when I tried to figure out how rain can prophesy things - then I imagined the rain creating indentations on the snow, forming runes similar to I-Ching on the ice, the "divination" of the first couplet.

I also tried to bring in Robert Frost's fire-or-ice dichotomy of the world's end here. The word "consumed" (e.g. eaten) as by fire also heightens the alternative to "famine". Also, note the use of the wording to hold "fast" to strengthen the idea of resolution; it isn't a coincidence that the word also hints at starvation.

There are a lot of other poetic and linguistic techniques I use here, using sentence beginnings and endings to heighten emphasis for example, but that would take forever to go over!

In any case, I take more liberties in the final couplet, circling back to to nature, destiny, beginning a prophecy likely to be different from our own.

And yes, I agonized over keeping "Chieko" as a third-person reference as in the original, but in the end decided that the immediacy of addressing her directly as "you" makes the piece more personal.

[marc]

Jan, out of curiosity, why would you use "enlightenment" for 覚悟?