A Wordﾕs Power: On the Additional ﾒSnowﾓ in …



A Word’s Power: The Additional “Snow” in a Japanese

Pre-Feminist Poem’s English Translation

Noriko Takeda

Hiroshima University, Japan

1. YOSANO Akiko’s cherry blossoms poem

The modernization of Japanese lyricism was executed principally by a Japanese female poet named YOSANO Akiko. Her first collected poems were given the general title Midaregami (Tangled Hair) and published in 1901. As is suggested by the dramatic title, Tangled Hair, Yosano’s collection inaugurated a powerful voice for symbolically expressing the sensibility of Japanese individuals under waves of global modernization. With meaningful words such as “stars,” “fans,” and “blossoms,” her first collection emits an enlightening force with the potential--or at least an engaging illusion--to dissipate any imposed limitedness.

At the time Tangled Hair was published, Japanese modernization was being propelled by the government in the form of drastic Westernization. The official reformation had formally started with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The Restoration set up a capitalistic society within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, and thus negated the traditional feudal system. The old regime based on agricultural communities had existed for about 700 years, officially since 1192, under the hegemony of succeeding Shogunates, i.e., Generals, who held real power in place of the symbolic emperor.

The aesthetic vehicle for conveying the Japanese psyche under the feudal regime was the 31-syllable waka, i.e., Japanese song. The waka represents the matrix of the 17-syllable haiku that was shaped as a poetic genre in the early Edo period (1603-1867). At the publication of Yosano Akiko’s collection, the waka had also enjoyed a history of domination in Japanese literature for around 1,000 years; the first court anthology, entitled Kokin waka shu and established in about 913, authorized the waka as a primary instrument for transmitting the Japanese mind. The millennium of dominance includes the epoch of ancient monarchy that decided upon the waka’s elegant conventions around the imperial court, before the inception of the military regime. The restricted form of 31 syllables simulates Japan’s small land to be cooperatively cultivated by communal groups of rice croppers. The minuscule poetic form was actually not monopolized by the aristocrats; according to Anthony Thwaite, the waka was, and still is, “a poetry for everyone” in Japan for recording everyday sensation (xxxvii). Haruko Wakita delineates the waka’s popularization all over the country during the feudal period (132). Professionals or amateurs, the old poets were nonetheless required to follow the waka’s conventional demand for aristocratic elegance. Prestigious but democratic, the waka symbolized imperial power coming from one privileged family, which was ascribed to a source of divine if naturalistic sunlight.1 The country of a restricted size is based on a natural fusion and equality.

Yosano Akiko’s modern/modernist originality resides in an idiolectal innovation of the traditional waka, which was renamed tanka, meaning short song. Her reformation revivified the waka in codified classicism with a diversified coloration as seen in luminous expressions such as “my surging blood” and “To whom should I speak / Of the color of crimson.”

Yosano’s new tanka poems mobilized, in fact, a fresh vocabulary in the conventional 31 syllables. Though keeping the old waka’s syllabic framework, the female poet broke up the rule of the elegant waka that had strictly limited the number of usable words.2 She was successful in conveying the new women’s liberated feelings with provocative words such as “breasts,” “skin,” and “blood.” The poet even presented an audacious shot of the author-speaker’s naked body, though under a translucent veil of aestheticism based on figurative indirectness--for example, the comparison of the speaker’s female body to oceanic waves. Through Yosano, the traditional waka in a monochrome sentimentality was changed into an active body with stimulations. The waka was transformed from a shadowy sign of arbitrary conventions to an individual body as “objet” for transgressive signification. The transgression should be ascribed to the female poet’s critical insight into the feudal system’s oppression and exploitation, resorting to the community’s natural tendency for egalitarian fusion. Any sense of oneself is opposed to the collective identity. For the poet, the women to be enhanced by her poetry represented a symbolic group of scapegoats set for the alleviation of communal pressure, even if its effect is temporary. The women continue the cycle of absorption and production. In a sense, just like Prometheus, the female poet desired to appropriate all the ubiquitous sunlight into her illuminating language for a new societal connection; she is equally a symbol of communal oneness. The equalizing sunshine needs to shift from top-down to bottom-up, symbolized by the tangled hair coming from Yosano’s female speaker. The protesting poet must be legitimated as a feminist, though her challenging poetry was published before the currency of the concept “feminist” in Japan.3 She remarkably contributed to a catharsis of the Japanese society by the individualistic scrambling with her energetic tanka poems. Her first tanka collection, Tangled Hair, “was an immediate sensation and sold an unprecedented number of copies for a book of poetry” (Keene 24). The wonderful collection is, however, not a heavenly gift to a solitary genius; it is an anticipated fruit of the efforts of the poetic reformers including Yosano Akiko’s teacher and partner, Yosano Tekkan. The collection’s success owes much to Tekkan’s creative editing.4

The volume, Tangled Hair, bursts with the combined 399 tanka poems, each of which is exclusively self-assertive, paradoxically within the identical framework of 31 syllables. From another angle, Yosano Akiko’s collection of 399 short tanka pieces constitutes itself as a unified long poem modeled on Western works. There existed, in fact, a group of her contemporary poets who abandoned the waka’s syllabic framework to create a new-styled long poem under a direct influence of Western models. Until the conscious reformation of Japanese poetics triggered by the 1868 Restoration, the poetic domain of the country was shared by the waka, designated as “song,” and the kanshi as “poem” (Seki 8); the kanshi represents the works written in classical Chinese by intelligentsia.

Yosano’s new art is kaleidoscopic, reflecting the ethos of the time. Her long if crystallized first collection, Tangled Hair, can be summed up by a suite of single words such as “passion,” “protest,” “overheat,” “redness,” “explosion,” and “positivity.” The individual words simulate each tanka piece, the collection’s general title, “Tangled Hair,” its six chapters named “Enji-Murasaki (Crimson-Purple),” “Ship of Lotus Flowers,” “White Lily,” “Young Wife of Twenty,” “The Dancers,” and “The Spring Thought,” as well as the author-speaker’s distinctive self that is subjectively and naturalistically endeared by herself in the modern individualistic consciousness. One of the representative poems that symbolize the positivity of the Yosano collection’s euphoric--that is, individual and collective--world is as follows:

淸水へ祇園をよぎる櫻月夜こよひ逄ふ人みなうつくしき

My literal translation of the above poem is:

Passing the town of Gion to go to Kiyomizudera temple, I have found all the pedestrians beautiful in the moonlight which comes through cherry blossoms in full bloom.

From another angle, the above positive poem grotesquely distorts all the faces of the pedestrians; from a conventional point of view, all of them could not easily become “beautiful” without some sheer miracle which does not appear to be mentioned in the poem. The seemingly-exaggerated humanism is not, however, imposing nor irrelevant; the energy of the speaker’s joyous celebration is sublimated into a transcendental light from the cosmic body, i.e., the moonlight coming down onto earth for the pedestrians through the nightly flowers. Prevailing in Japan, the cherry flowers have embellished and consecrated the springtime. Simulating the lachrymal Madonna, the flowers in a whitish color tinted with pink represent one of the most beloved symbols in the old waka. The poet Yosano reinforces a divine power, by combining the cherry blossom’s influential power and the seraphic moonlight. The poem’s central word, “櫻月夜” (the night with the moon and cherry blossoms), is of the poet’s coinage, fusing the moonlight and the flowers in one word form. The suggestive place names, “淸水” (“Kiyomizu”) and “祇園” (“Gion”), help to strengthen the cosmic power drawn into the central word linking the blossoms and the moon. “Kiyomizu” indicates the place around Kiyomizudera temple, famous for its magnificent platform set up on a steep mountainside, whereas “Gion” corresponds to a representative town for seeking pleasure and liveliness. Expressed by the full-fledged Chinese ideograms, the place names embody a source of miraculous potential for completing the cosmos.

The culminant heavenly light is caught by the walking viewers, including the author-speaker herself whose glances send the assimilated/reflected light back into the sky. The advancing poem is a symbol of salvation, and the salvation eternally circulates; the earthly pedestrians absorb the divine beauty of the transcendental light, and the absorption endlessly continues in a cyclical give-and-take. Fundamentally, in that encircling and thus unifiable world, everyone reasonably becomes beautiful. The circular movement is confirmed by the ending adjective “うつくしき” (“beautiful”); the adjective is ungrammatically in a form to be connected to substantives, thus iteratively referring back to the preceding word for pedestrians, “人.” The author-speaker’s apparently-outrageous admiration for the pedestrians only causes the readers some sense of pain. The pain emerges from the reader’s sympathy with the young female speaker’s struggle for salvation by making the most of the waka’s strong convention; she is courageously trying to break up, or rather, complete the waka’s small framework of authenticity. “I” and “We” are both cooperative and conflictive, just like idiolect and sociolect.

2. H. H. Honda’s English translation with the additional “snow”

In an English translation of the above poem, nevertheless, the apparently negative word “snow” is found. This is antagonistic to the Yosano original’s absolute positivity which is based on the eternity of spring beauty. Decisively, the word that directly corresponds to the word “snow” cannot be found in Yosano’s original work. “Snow,” hence, arouses suspicion; is it the negative term intended to innovate the Yosano original’s overdetermined picture in its full spring-ness? Or, has the translator just ironically interpreted the young author’s apparently-optimistic tribute to everyone? The translation by a Japanese male scholar, Heihachiro Honda (1893-1973), is as follows:5

The cherries and the moon, how sweet!

So are the folks this night I meet,

As I to Kiyomizu go

Through Gion bright with lovely snow.

At first reading, the conclusive word “snow” must be taken as only additional. The extra word spoils the completeness of the Yosano original with its freezing fatality. As a symbol of the flamboyant collection, the poem represents a cheerful applause to the spring cherry blossoms, as well as to the common viewers, all of whom are extolled to be “beautiful” from a humanitarian/feminist point of view. Placed at the ending, the comprehensive adjective “beautiful” is a synonym of “immortal.” The minus image of the temple and the night is engulfed by the conclusive qualification for explosion. In the translation’s restricted framework, consisting only of four rhymed verses, the additional word “snow” that designates winter at the ending of the whole text easily draws the reader’s attention in a negative way; the word pushes him/her into a different world of Japanese conventional transience. The deathly “snow” appears to deny the Yosano original’s delightful world which challenges societal restrictions. The extra word also seems to damage the crystalline form of the translation itself that embodies a four-cornered world; taking a square shape, the text consists of four verses in tetrameter, reinforced by the sensually-animating adjective “sweet” with an exclamation mark.

The seemingly far-fetched word “snow” may not be rejected as a bad or wrong translation, nonetheless, once the Japanese original’s intertextual connection with one of A. E. Housman’s poems is revealed. The revelation occurs, indeed, through the intermediary of Honda’s translation with the very far-fetched word “snow.” The word itself is poetic and suggestive. Without any title, but numbered as II, the Housman poem is in A Shropshire Lad (1896), connecting “the cherry” in full “bloom” to “snow.” The text is as follows:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

Various features common and essential to both the above English poem and the Honda translation of Yosano’s Japanese original can be immediately recognized: both are based on four rhymed lines in tetrameter, both end with the word “snow,” both the texts’ second-to-last lines are awkwardly terminated with the intransitive verb “go,” and in both poems the cherries are embellished by “snow,” as well as qualified by the adjective “lovely(-loveliest).” The unstable line-stop by its ending verb without a direct object produces a harassing up-and-down melody that entangles silence: “I will go / To see. . . .” The abrupt tone is characteristic of the Housman poetry, adding to it a refreshing modernity. John Sparrow indicates Housman’s naïve and thus all the more charming wording in his introduction to the Collected Poems of A. E. Housman in the following comment: “[Housman’s poems] express a few unsophisticated moods in a few pronounced and simple rhythms” (10). In his translated work, The Poetry of Yosano Akiko, which includes his apparently far-fetched translation with the word “snow,” H. H. Honda does not mention the Housman poem. Nevertheless, the evident similarity between the Housman poem and the Honda translation makes the reader think of the two texts’ intertextual connection without difficulty; precisely, the connection represents an influence of the Housman poem (published in 1896) on the Honda translation (published in 1957). The oldest Japanese translation of A Shropshire Lad in a book form which includes Housman’s cherry poem dates back to 1940; the translator is Tatsuzo Hijikata (3-4). Furthermore, after the Second World War, which ended in 1945, it may not have been difficult to read the Housman poem’s original in English because of the resumed internationalization in Japan. According to Hatsue Kawamura (224-25), the translator Honda was versed in English poetry as a teacher of the language at some Japanese universities. The English poem may well be considered his translation’s model.

An apparent reason for H. H. Honda’s connecting of the two original poems is that the Japanese poem’s summarizing word may be “love,” whereas the English poem begins with the word “Love(liest),” insinuating the speaker’s affection toward the cherry, the poem’s vegetal heroine. Incidentally, Honda designates the Japanese poet as “A Poetess of Love” in the introduction to his translated work which includes the translation with “snow,” and the poet’s cherry blossoms piece in question is one of her representative humanitarian poems. On the other hand, the Housman poem’s primary symbol is the white cherry blossoms, representing purity, while the Japanese poem begins with the ideogram “淸,” signifying purification. Another reason is that the English poem represents a triple form in three stanzas, each in four verses, as if containing three separate texts; according to Hatsue Kawamura, Honda thought that a tanka poem should be translated into English as a four-line verse (227). The four lines remind one, indeed, of the waka’s syllabic division into five parts. The English poem’s Trinitarian form may have suggested to Honda the playful connecting of the two original poems by his own translation that may equally be viewed as a creative and original work. His playfulness can also be detected in the contrast between the Japanese original’s first word “淸水,” which literally means “pure water,” and the translation’s final word, “snow,” representing a wintry form of water. It is more conceivable that the Honda translation should have been modeled on the Housman poem than that the translation might have respectfully followed the Yosano original.

3. The poetic Trinity

With scrutiny, however, it is revealed that H. H. Honda’s seemingly far-fetched translation indicates an unnoticeable but essential connection between the Yosano original and the Housman poem, presumably without a relationship of influence. The two texts’ formal features are too distinctive to suspect any direct interaction between them.6 The Honda translation suggests, nonetheless, three kinds of accidental but fundamental commonalities concerning the two original poems. First, the Housman poem’s latent syllabic structure, that is, 32 syllables in the first two stanzas and 31 syllables in the final stanza, is closely connected to that of the Japanese waka in 31 syllables. Second, the two poems’ mutual theme may be summarized as follows: “Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may.” The Japanese poem enhances a precious moment of passing blooming in springtime, whereas the English poem foregrounds the speaker’s will to live out his privileged moments; the moments are symbolized by the white cherry blossoms in this transient world. According to B. J. Leggett (Land 12-15), among 63 lyrics of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, the lyric II on the cherry flowers specifically emphasizes the “transience which characterizes existence” (Land 12), a strong motif of A Shropshire Lad. Different from the English poem whose transient theme is evident, the Japanese poem almost completely dissimulates a hint for inconstancy with its dazzling flamboyance. It is the Honda translation that turns the reader’s eye to a minimal shadow of transience in the Japanese poem. Since the pedestrians are all mortal, the speaker prays for their eternal beauty. The distance between Honda’s English translation and the Japanese original is, hence, longer than that between the translation and Housman’s English poem, even though the length is suggestive and cathartic.

Third, the two original poems share an obsession of calculation: Housman’s 12-line verse in the triplex four-line stanzas takes the speaker-author’s reckoning of his age as its central part, whereas the Yosano poem is based on the author’s syllabic count superimposed on the poem speaker’s recognition of each pedestrian’s face. The two texts’ obsession for　arithmetic is preserved by the Honda translation that is made up of the symmetrical four rhymed lines, in eight syllables each.7 The emotional reckoning leads to that of the flowers and of the people born in this world. The reckoning represents an inveterate desire of the modern self wishing to be endlessly expanded, dissipating the self’s existential dilemma as an isolated whole. It also embodies an incantation for privileging this passing moment and one’s mortal self.

In traditional Japanese poetics, the ambivalent cherry flowers symbolize the evanescence of human life, and especially that of feminine life, while simultaneously celebrating the rebirth of springtime. An old court lady named Ono no Komachi,　who was renowned for both her poetic talent and physical beauty, wrote the following waka: “The lustre of the flowers / Has faded and passed, / While on idle things / I have spent my body / In the world’s long rains” (Bownas and Thwaite 84). In the old waka, the word “flower(s)” (“hana”) exclusively designates cherry blossoms. The popular flowers still retain a symbolic status in Japan. On the other hand, Yosano’s poem, the original of the Honda translation, competitively emphasizes the living force of cherry blossoms, by calling them “sakura.” “Sakura” is the cherry flowers’ specific name, with the morpheme “saku” meaning “bloom.” The poet keeps the uniqueness of the cherry blossoms that live their prime, without dissolving them into a floral generality represented by the unifying term that designates all the flowers, “hana.” Yosano’s cherry blossoms even use death for life, as with T. S. Eliot’s “Lilacs” in “the cruellest month.”

In contrast, cherry blossoms have not constituted a thematic topos in Anglo-American poetry. The white flowers are not Christian symbols. In A Concordance to Milton’s English Poetry, the entry of “cherry” is not seen. According to A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake, the poet mentions the cherry fruits, but not flowers (327). The English cherries for red fruits are different from the Japanese flowering cherries for blossom viewing (Suzuki 68). A. E. Housman’s cherry poem may be viewed as a riposte to the natural beauty of cherry fruits developed in the Romantic tradition, concretized by William Wordsworth as “Feasting at the Cherry Tree” and “Is red as a ripe cherry” (Cooper 133).8 Housman’s Victorian poem seeks for an originality of the unnoticed white flowers and their exoticism. The flowers are, in fact, ambivalent; they represent life and death, spirituality and physicality, heartiness and skinniness, bridal veil and winding sheet, or virile power and virginal potential.

In the Trinitarian 3-stanza verse, the English poet foregrounds the transience of white flowers that is connected to the “Eastertide” spirit from the tradition of Christianity. The word “Easter” includes, however, the pagan “East.” The new religious symbol, the white cherry blossoms, is an ironically-reversed version of the full-grown red fruits, the metamorphoses of Eve and Adam’s red apple. It may be possible to trace the Japanese waka’s influence on the ambiguous Housman poem presumably through various English translations which were available at that time.9 In A Dictionary of Symbols by J. E. Cirlot, “the cherry-tree” is classified into “Chinese symbology” (350). The newly developed flowers are, however, chastely harmonious with the English lyrical tradition. The purified whiteness leads to the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s celestial beauty. It can be suspected that Housman’s flowery whiteness is shadowed on Ezra Pound’s representative Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro” (1916): “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The Pound poem shows a trace of influence from a Japanese haiku poem (Brooks and Warren 71-72). Shropshire’s cherry flowers blooming in early spring with an image of snow may be an apparition, or imaginative invention of Housman; according to John Bayley, the poet “had never spent much time in Shropshire, and that the details in his poems were ‘sometimes quite wrong’” (3). Incidentally, cherries and roses belong to the same botanical family.

H. H. Honda’s translation with “snow” embodies a condensed fusion of the Yosano original and the Housman poem. The hornlike, obtrusive word “snow” is a foregrounded sign which condenses the three poetic works, including the rhymed translation. The “extra” word is, in fact, symbolic, inviting the reader into an ever-growing world of imagery and concepts.

It should be affirmed that, under a heap of forwarding presence, the Yosano original conceals a shadow of winter snow. The Yosano poem refers to the beauty of spring, thereby finally reaching the contrastive winter. Nevertheless, in the poem’s overall vividness supported by the individualistic flower name “sakura,” the reader’s evoked image of dead winter is slight and temporary. The momentary image pinpoints, however, a traditional Japanese sense of beauty summed up by the compound word “snow-moon-flower”（“雪月花”）. The word symbolizes the seasonal beauty of the hilly but oceanic country, Japan, psychologically nuanced by the Shintoist/Buddhist notion of transience. Moreover, the word posits the seasonal division as dissoluble, suggesting a Japanese tendency for overall fusion enhanced by the Yosano original. From another angle, Yosano’s modern compound, “櫻月夜,” may be viewed as the poet’s conscious revision of the old one, “雪月花.” Keeping the traditional waka’s syllabic framework, the Yosano poem conceives at its depth a long history of Japanese classicism. The intralingual/intertextual basis embodies a fertilizing springboard for Yosano’s poetics of unexpectedness, optimism, and salvation. The Honda translation has supplied a clear image of snow to the Yosano original, so that the original reveals a popularized beauty of “雪月花” (“snow-moon-flower”). A translation is generally an interpretation of the original work which indicates the original’s potential of signification, as is suggested by C. S. Peirce.10 The Honda translation’s additional word “snow” is the peak of a verbal pyramid onto which the poetic Trinity sublimates itself.

4. A poem as a flowering word

From a word, a cosmos of imagery blooms, as is suggested by Stéphane Mallarmé (368).11 In making a syntactical sequence, the language user easily recognizes that a single word, as a formal and semantic unit, has an endless potential of signification, depending on the combined words. A single word makes no sense, or rather, means everything. On the other hand, a poem represents a unified form of semantic parallelism and may thus be viewed as a development of a single word. The notion of the poem as a word is also presented by Jurij Lotman,12 based on Roman Jakobson’s following thesis: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (27). Jakobson suggests that a poem is only a succession of the equivalent words. A poem’s semantic parallelism owes much to the formal and semantic repetition characteristic of the poetry genre, and contributes to the condensation of each poem to be reduced to a single word in the reader’s interpretative consciousness based on linguistic knowledge. The typical shortness of poetry, which is indicated by E. A. Poe, also pushes a poem into an isolated world/word of unity.13

As for Yosano’s original poem, it may be viewed as a flowering expansion of the single word “love,” whereas A. E. Housman’s English poem can be considered a development of the word “passion” in the double meaning of love and suffering. The Housman poem is numbered as II, using the coupling number, and the symbolic white flowers are pregnantly ambiguous, contrastively evoking bloody scenes along with the suspicious expressions “Is hung,” “score,” “little room,” and “hung with snow.”

The function of the translated word “snow” is multilateral;　the apparently extra word should be counted as a summary of the two original poems--the Yosano tanka and the Housman poem--while simultaneously claiming the importance of translation, this indispensable medium of communication and understanding. It also emphasizes that a literary text’s basis is no other than a word, exemplified by the symbolic “snow” for eliciting totality. The “snow” in overall appropriation refers to the incessantly-growing territory of poetry as the interactive combination of the author’s original writing and the reader’s re-creative interpretation as indicated by William Empson. In his Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson accepts the reader’s compensating “invention” as “the essential fact about the poetical use of language” (25). The invention corresponds to “a mental need for sense-giving configuration” (Valdés 6). The crystallizing/foregrounded word “snow” may also be recognized as a comprehensive poetic form, i.e., a complete poem. At least, the word represents an intertextual and thus melting node of the three related poetic works.

In this transient but encircling world, real snow represents a seed of spring, or rather, a crystallization of spring. In the same vein, the extra word “snow” designates the powerful if paradoxical advancement of the pre-feminist Yosano Akiko’s world of fullness; the ironical word is endowed with ontological positivity as a verbal form, despite its concept of fugitiveness. The circular/sunlit world’s struggling advancement was for the reformation of the conventional waka under a prevailing impact of Western models. Though fictional, language has also the force to change this real world that concurrently affects and stimulates language. As a translation of the spring in the image of erupting water, the saturated word “snow” conclusively, if temporarily, symbolizes a maternal repository of powerful creativity.

Notes

1 Before the end of World War II, the imperial family was traced back to the ancestral goddess representing the sun (“Amaterasu omikami”).

2 For the waka’s limitation of its vocabulary, see Kawamoto 85-87.

3 Yosano Akiko’s Tangled Hair initiated the feminist movement in the following liberalist era, Taisho (1912-26). The poet’s influence is clear in the symbolic expression of the movement’s manifesto: “Once women represented the sunshine” (“Seito”).

4 According to Kumi Okina (23), Tekkan may have been concerned with the order of the poems and the selection of titles.

5 The translator’s first long name, Heihachiro, is abbreviated as H. H., perhaps simulating the Western combination of first and middle names.

6 To date, I have not seen any indication of a possible literary influence between A. E. Housman and Yosano.

7 Concerning the Housman poem’s second scholarly stanza, B. J. Leggett states that “There is more attention to arithmetic than to feeling here” (The Poetic Art 48).

8 Tomio Suzuki indicates Shakespeare’s usage of cherry fruits (66), to which Housman’s flowery image may be traced back.

9 For the Japanese waka’s translations published by English scholars in the 19th century, see Kawamura 71-171.

10 David Savan indicates that “according to Peirce, interpretation is translation” (17).

11 In his “Crise de vers,” Mallarmé states: “Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets” (368).

12 See Lotman 86-87, 165, 168, and 185.

13 For further discussion on a poem as a word, see Takeda 11-17.

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