Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/18

6 was also developed, and it was even possible for poets to keep two different sets of images going at the same time through an entire poem without any awkwardness, as in this example:

One may give two almost entirely different translations of these lines. The first, the more personal interpretation, might be, “Sadly I long for death. My heart tormented to see how he, the inconstant one, is weary of me, I am weak as the forest dew.” Or, by using other meanings of the sounds, “See how it melts away, that dew in the wind-swept forest, where the autumn colours are changing!” Neither of these translations is a full rendering, because in the poet’s mind and words there is a constant shifting of the two sets of images, so that the dew which looks as if it soon must be melted away by the autumnal wind becomes one with the woman who has been abandoned by her bored lover, and who wonders what keeps her still alive. It is not that the dew is simply being used metaphorically to describe the woman’s state (and to suggest her tears), for the image of the dew is used in its full sense of the natural phenomenon in the second rendering of the poem I gave. The author meant both to be understood at the same time, to draw as it were two concentric circles of meaning, each complete but indissolubly linked to the other.

The effect achieved in this poem was naturally possible only because of the variety of word-play that Japanese affords. But Japanese writers have always been sensitive to the overtones of words, and their exploitation of the possibilities of their language is not merely a fortuitous result of the ease of punning. Place-names and their meanings have especially fascinated the Japanese.