著者

佐藤 紘彰

出版者

上智大学

雑誌

アメリカ・カナダ研究 (ISSN:09148035)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.10, pp.71-89, 1993-04-30

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In appealing to his lover or trying to "facilitate the study of the Japanese text, " Arthur Waley translated the 5-7-5-7-7-syllable tanka in five lines, often padding his translations in the manner of Robert Brower and Earl Miner. But in translating The Tale of Genji and Murasaki's Diary he incorporated most of the tanka into the prose, so that an inadvertant reader may never know that Genji contains nearly 800 tanka. Reading Waley's tanka translations incorporated into the prose text, one wonders if it may not be more natural to translate this verse form in one line. After all, unlike most English translators of tanka who believe with Waley that "the tanka is a poem of five lines, " most Japanese tanka writers, Tawara Machi of Sarada Kinenbi fame included, regard it as a "one-line poem." If one function of translation is to reproduce the original, shouldn't the attempt to do so include the line formation as well? Or if the breakup of the five syllabic units is to be stressed, why not go a step further and stress the syllabic count as well? What about the flow of the original? This paper looks at these questions by citing translations of Waley, Brower and Miner, Seidensticker, Bowring, Heinrich, Shinoda and Goldstein, Watson, LaFleur, Rodd and Hen-kenius, McCullough, and Carpenter against Sato's own monolinear translations.