Quote:
Ron Tisdale wrote:
Hi Erik, can you provide samples of Hearn's translation of the texts in question?
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Well, since he died in 1904 before that text was written, very likely not, but I'll get my trusty weejy board and see what I can do ...
I was referring to his interpretation of the concept of "yamato damashii." He married into the (still) very prominent Koizumi family, became a Japanese citizen, translated a number of folk stories and wrote extensively about the contemporaneous culture of early modernizing Japan. He studied with Kano and introduced the first work on judo/jujitsu in English in 1897. He might just have some tangential contributions...
A general cultural overview:
http://books.google.com/books?id=CL0...ation#PPP13,M1
Some letters are collected here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=N_Q...hl=en#PPA81,M1
Some thoughts in a chapter on jujutsu (not his book of that title) are here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Mlg...hearn#PPP13,M1
And a pertinent one to the topic here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/890798/Gli...Lafcadio-Hearn
In the latter, he quoted a poem of Motoori Norinaga (who all but invented the concept of yamato-damashii in Kojiki-Den as a near-ideology for the Kokugaku). Referring to "Yamato-Gokoro" Hearn translated it as:
"If one should ask you
concerning the heart of a true Japanese,
point to the wild cherry flower
glowing in the sun."
The romaji is all that is given but it goes:
Shikishima no
Yamato-gokoro wo
Hito-towoba
Asa-hi ni niou
Yamazakura bana.
The wild cherry in the romaji he cites is "yamazakura" and he comments that unlike the cultivated types, it leafs before blossoming, and he also notes a pun associated with the word. in the passage following he also translated a proverb "As the cherry is first among flowers, so the warrior should be first among men."
The implication is plain -- first to will to live; first to will to die. "Asagao", the morning glory is one of the images used in some circles for the principle of aiki. It has a similar image of both bursting forth and ephemerality. (The dynamic of that blossom has other features of interest to me, in its physics, but I'll leave that aside.)