Ming Govaars: over Henri Borel

[De volgende beknopte inleiding werd in 1989-1990 geschreven door de onlangs overleden Ming Govaars (Dr. M.T.N. Govaars-Tjia, 1922-2016). Het stuk was oorspronkelijke bedoeld voor publicatie in een vooraanstaand Nederlands naslagwerk. Om redenen die niet meer te achterhalen zijn, is het ongepubliceerd gebleven. Na het schrijven van dit stuk werkte mevr. Govaars gedurende vele jaren aan haar proefschrift: Hollands onderwijs in een koloniale samenleving: De Chinese ervaring in Indonesië 1900-1942 (eerste druk 1999, tweede druk 2002, Engelse vertaling Dutch Colonial Education: The Chinese Experience in Indonesia, 1900-1942 in 2005 verschenen). Daarna hoopte zij een volgende ‘book-length study’ aan leven en werk van Henri Borel te wijden; dit projekt heeft zij niet meer kunnen voltooien.]

BOREL, Henri Jean François, schrijver en criticus (Dordrecht 23-11-1869 – ’s-Gravenhage 31-8-1933). Zoon van George Frederik Willem Borel, generaal-majoor der artillerie, en Suzanne Elizabeth Marcella. Gehuwd op 8-6-1892 met Maria Christina Zur Haar. Uit dit huwelijk werden 1 zoon en 1 dochter geboren. Na echtscheiding (26-11-1902) gehuwd op 10-12-1902 met Helena Maria de Hartog. Uit dit huwelijk werd 1 zoon geboren. Na echtscheiding (19-5-1908) gehuwd op 23-2-1911 met Anna Maria Hufstadt. Uit dit huwelijk werd 1 dochter geboren.

Borel bezocht de hbs te ’s-Gravenhage, Goes en Roermond. In 1887 slaagde hij voor het examen ter vervulling van een der drie vacatures voor de opleiding tot tolk in de Chinese taal, waarvoor zich 63 kandidaten hadden aangemeld. Hij studeerde van 1888 tot 1892 aan de Leidse Universiteit Chinese taal- en letterkunde bij G. Schlegel. In september 1892 vertrok Borel voor twee jaar naar China om zich op het eiland Ku Lang Su verder te bekwamen in het Chinees. Tijdens zijn verblijf in China publiceerde de Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant zijn eerste journalistiek werk in de vorm van brieven over de in 1894 uitgebroken Chinees-Japanse oorlog.

            Borels eerste benoeming tot tolk voor de Chinese taal in dienst van het Nederlands-Indische gouvernement was op 24 oktober 1894. Deze op die wijze begonnen ambtelijke loopbaan zou een aaneenschakeling van moeilijkheden met de regering en botsingen met plaatselijke autoriteiten worden. Spoedig als ambtenaar voor Chinese Zaken betiteld schroomde Borel niet wonde plekken aan te wijzen, wantoestanden, corruptie en onrecht te signaleren, en zijn rapporten daarover vielen bij de regering niet altijd in goede aarde. Intussen nam de Indische pers onthullende artikelen van hem op. ‘Men is in Batavia woedend op me. Het publiek maken van wandaden is het ergste wat je kunt doen, de wandaden zelf niet’, schreef hij op 29 februari 1896 aan Frederik van Eeden. Op zijn kritische uitlatingen over A.L. van Hasselt, resident van Riouw en Onderhorigheden, waarover de regering haar ernstige ontevredenheid betuigde, volgde Borels benoeming op 1 oktober 1896 tot ambtenaar voor Chinese Zaken te Makassar. Hier wachtte hem een periode van nieuwe strubbelingen en conflicten.

            Mede geïnspireerd door zijn aanrakingen met Oost-Azië was Borel ook literair werkzaam. In Nederlandse literaire tijdschriften als De Gids werden zijn verzen en essays gepubliceerd, en een eerste boek over Wijsheid en schoonheid uit China (1895), dat verscheidene herdrukken beleefde, had ook een literair-leesbaar gemaakte inslag. Hierin wijdde hij niet alleen aandacht aan bijv. toneel en begrafenisgebruiken maar ook aan ‘Wu Wei’, dat hij omschreef als ‘een fantasie naar aanleiding van Lao Tse’s filosofie’ (letterlijk: niet-handelen, d.w.z. niet opzettelijk handelen). Hij zou later op dit voor hem zo geliefde thema telkens terugkomen.

            In dezelfde lijn van zijn eerste boek lag de uitgave, waar Borel nog in Indië een begin mee maakte, over De Chineesche filosofie toegelicht voor niet-sinologen; het eerste deel over Confucius zag in 1896 het licht, het tweede deel over Lao Tse in 1898, terwijl in 1931 pas het derde deel over Mencius zou verschijnen. De boeken vormden de eerste oorspronkelijke Nederlandse vertalingen direct uit het Chinees van teksten van deze filosofen en trachtten met commentaar een breed lezerspubliek te bereiken. In dat opzicht zou hij, gezien de vele herdrukken van dit en ander werk, succes hebben. Juist voor Nederland met zijn koloniën vond Borel een helder begrip omtrent China en de Chinezen dringend nodig. Hij aarzelde niet scherpe kritiek uit te oefenen op bekende Nederlandse sinologen omdat zij aan deze popularisering zijns inziens te weinig meewerkten. Met zijn “Het Daghet in den Oosten” (1910), waarin hij reeds de Chinese revolutie van 1911 voorspelde, en De geest van China (1916) zou Borel eigen streven trouw blijven.

            Reeds vroeg tijdens zijn Indische loopbaan had Borel ook voor de inheemse kunst een lans gebroken: in zijn publikaties zoals Wijsheid en schoonheid uit Indië (1905), en in zijn tweede bundel Opstellen (1906) had hij tevens het eerste waarachtige inzicht in de Javaanse dans en de wajang getoond. Gerard Brom zou later opmerken (Java in onze kunst (Rotterdam, 1931) 175-178, 222-225) dat Borel over de gamelan en de Javaanse dans geschreven had met een oorspronkelijkheid die zijn verdienste voor de Indische kunst van blijvende waarde deed zijn.

            In deze Indische jaren leverde Borel, afgezien van verzen en essays, in ander opzicht literair werk met zijn eerste roman, Het jongetje (1898), een verhaal over de schuchtere liefde van een opgroeiende knaap voor zijn aanbeden meisje. Hoewel uitgekreten als week, sentimenteel en geen literatuur, was het een veelgelezen boek. Een Duitse vertaling verscheen onder de titel Junge Liebe (1907). In de liefdesroman Een droom (1899), met een dichterlijke beschrijving van het bergland Tosari op Java, liet Borel volgens de letterkundige Charles van Deventer het verre Holland met Indië meevoelen: ‘En dit werd een nieuwe verovering van Java genoemd, waardoor het Oosten een heiligdom kreeg in ons hart’. (Gerard Brom, Java in onze kunst, 178.)

            Na zijn diensttijd in Makassar (1896-1898) was Borel als ambtenaar voor Chinese Zaken te Soerabaia werkzaam. Eind 1899 kreeg hij wegens ziekte een tweejarig verlof naar Europa, welk verlof met enkele verlengingen tot 1903 zou duren. Hij verbond zich contractueel met een uitgever om tweemaal per jaar een roman te schrijven. Zo produceerde hij de zg. contractromans als o.a. Vlindertje, Een Haagse roman (1901). Deze periode heeft Borel als de onwaardigste van zijn literair leven beschouwd; hij heeft zichzelf nooit vergeven romanfabrikant te zijn geweest. In 1903 zag hij zijn dwaling in en ging hij opnieuw als ambtenaar voor Chinese Zaken naar Indië terug, waar Tandjong-Pinang zijn standplaats werd.

            In 1904 gaf de regering Borel opdracht na te gaan hoe de koelie-ordonnantie werkte. Dit leidde tot nieuwe conflicten. Borel, niet tevreden met wat men hem wilde laten zien, stelde een zelfstandig onderzoek in en trof in de tinmijnen van Singkep ergerlijke toestanden aan. Hij legde zijn bevindingen neer in een rapport, dat in Buitenzorg groot opzien verwekte en volgens een persbericht uit 1933 tot die dag geheim was gebleven. Borel moest met ‘ziekteverlof’ naar Nederland en zag zich met ingang van 2 augustus 1904 eervol uit zijn betrekking ontslagen.

            In 1905 zond gouverneur-generaal J.B. van Heutsz aan Borel een telegram. Borel zou Semarang als standplaats krijgen indien hij naar Indië terugkeerde. Voor een ambtenaar voor Chinese Zaken was Semarang een standplaats van betekenis; bovendien beschouwde Borel het telegram van de gouverneur-generaal als een soort rehabilitatie. De arbeid op zichzelf was hem lief, en daarom trok hij vol goede moed ten derden male naar de tropen, waar hij midden in de toen opgekomen jong-Chinese Beweging viel. Voor deze beweging had Borel – en met hem bekende ambtsdragers als P.H. Fromberg (Justitie) en L.H.W. van Sandick (Binnenlands Bestuur) – waardering. Hij had sympathie voor deze jong-Chinese beweging ‘in zoover deze sociale en intellectueele verlichting en opheffing onzer Chineesche medebroeders beteekent. Ik zou in denzelfden zin sympathie hebben met een jong-Javaansche, of dergelijke beweging, ten doel hebbend de verlichting en opheffing van een Oostersch volk, en deze sympathie is gebaseerd op wat ééns Jezus Christus, en vóór hem reeds Confucius uitsprak: dat alle menschen broeders zijn’ (zie Verslagen der algemeene vergaderingen Indisch Genootschap (1913) 180). Ook te Semarang lag Borel overhoop met de bestuursautoriteiten, en op 21 augustus 1908 volgde zijn benoeming tot ambtenaar voor Chinese Zaken te Pontianak (westerafdeling van Borneo). In Pontianak begon Borel zich het Mandarijn-Chinees eigen te maken. Daartoe verbleef hij van 1909 tot 1910 in Peking. Op 7 november 1911 verleende de regering hem de persoonlijke titel van Adviseur voor Chinese Zaken.

            In het begin van 1912 vonden te Batavia en vooral te Soerabaia de zg. Chinezenrelletjes plaats, gevolgd door Borels overplaatsing naar Makassar, wegens onenigheden van hem met de resident van Soerabaia. Deze overplaatsing trok overigens de aandacht van de Tweede Kamer, die van minister van Koloniën J.H. de Waal Malefijt wel het rapport van de resident kreeg te lezen, maar niet dat van Borel. Van bepaalde kanten kreeg Borel hier zelfs wegens de moed van zijn overtuiging lof toegezwaaid. Toen Borel in 1913 met buitenlands verlof in Nederland was kon hij, als bekend deskundige omtrent China en de Chinezen in Indië, optreden. Nog in hetzelfde jaar verschenen De Chineesche beweging in Ned.-Indië, De Chineesche Republiek en Een werkkring in Indië.

            Bij Borel rijpte intussen het besluit niet in Indische dienst te blijven. In zijn ‘Autobiografie en autocritiek’(Het Vaderland, 23-11-1929) zou hij nog later uitleggen welke bezwaren hij had tegen die dienst, vooral in verband met het voor hem onbevredigende Chinezen-beleid van het gouvernement. Na zijn terugkeer in Nederland verloor hij in 1916 bij een ongeluk een deel van zijn gezichtsvermogen en kon hij op zijn verzoek eervol ontslag uit de Indische dienst krijgen. Nog eenmaal bracht hij in 1920 aan China een bezoek, waarvan Het schone eiland. Een tweede boek van wijsheid en schoonheid uit China (1922) de neerslag was. Maar ook daarna verloor Borel zijn liefde en aandacht voor China niet, al beklaagde hij zich achteraf er te weinig tijd voor te hebben gehad: ‘Door omstandigheden, die niets met mijn kennis van het Chineesch te maken hebben, ben ik niet in staat gesteld, toen ik uit Indië terugkwam, mij verder geheel aan de sinologische studie te wijden, en, waarom zou ik het niet eerlijk zeggen, dit is de groote teleurstelling van mijn leven.’ (Het Vaderland, 23-11-1929.)

            Een van die omstandigheden waarop Borel ongetwijfeld doelde was zijn aanstelling als criticus voor toneel en literatuur aan het dagblad Het Vaderland op 1 november 1916, een functie die hij tot zijn dood in 1933 zou behouden. Hij schreef recensies en literaire beschouwingen. Als criticus kende hij vriend noch vijand. Hij geloofde dat hij zijn kritische geest te danken had aan zijn vader, die als kapitein der artillerie in diens Onze vestiging in Atjeh (’s-Gravenhage, 1878) beleid en tactiek van generaal J. van Swieten scherp had veroordeeld.

            Ook in losse publikaties, dus buiten zijn krant, hield Borel zich met letterkundige onderwerpen intensief bezig. Zo bezorgde hij enkele vertalingen en bewerkingen van Europese literatuur. Voor Frederik van Eeden koesterde hij een grote bewondering; hij vertaalde in 1933 diens Welt-Eroberung durch Helden-Liebe (Berlin [etc.], 1911) in het Nederlands. Voor het ‘l’art pour l’lart’ van de Tachtigers had hij weinig waardering; enigszins in de lijn van de door hem gewaardeerde Louis Couperus volgde hij liever zijn eigen weg. Pierre H. Dubois schreef over Borel bij zijn honderdste geboortejaar (Het Vaderland, 28-11-1969) dat Borel ‘niet het begrip en de waardering heeft gehad, waarop hij voor een deel van zijn werk en zijn persoonlijkheid toch aanspraak mocht maken’. Dit is begrijpelijk, want Borel huldigde als sinoloog, als Indisch ambtenaar én als literator-criticus opvattingen die vaak indruisten tegen die van zijn tijdgenoten en superieuren.

--M.T.N. Govaars-Tjia

9 januari 1990

William Carlos Williams: Is less more?

In an earlier post,[1] I went on record saying I am in favor of reading a long poem in radically abridged form. My example was Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams. I said the version contained in the 1968 Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams,[2] which entirely omits the second and third ‘books’ of this long poem, retaining only the first book and the Coda, is more ‘incisive’ and more memorably ‘unique’ than the original which is more than twice as long.

            Recently I have had a similar reading experience, again involving a long poem by Williams. This past summer at a used-book store in Madison, Wisconsin, I bought William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems, published by New Directions in 1985 and edited by Charles Tomlinson. Unlike the earlier volume, this edition contains an extensive selection from Williams’ book-length poem Paterson.

            I am calling the selection ‘extensive,’ but this does not at all mean it is anything near the length of the original! The edition of the original I own, the ‘eighth Paperbook printing,’ is some 240 pages long.[3] In Tomlinson’s selected version, Paterson is represented by only 38 pages – less than one-sixth. If we look not at the total number of pages but at the proportional bulk of each of the five ‘books,’ the reduction is even more striking. The fifth book is represented by no more than a single page. The fourth book, comprising 56 pages in the original, again has been cut back to a single page. The third, originally 51 pages, is now two and a half. In other words, the last three books, which together occupied about two-thirds of the original, now make up less than one-eighth.

            It is interesting, but also fruitless, to speculate as to why Tomlinson chose to truncate the later parts so radically. Opinions differ as to whether Williams did the right thing by adding a fifth book long after the first four had already been published; what cannot be denied is that the fifth book alters, re-unifies and refocuses the whole. Williams’ biographer Paul Mariani calls the fifth book ‘an extended meditation on the woman, the counterpoise of the male sensibility...’[4] and goes on to say that its ‘central icon’ is ‘the Virgin holding the Baby.’[5] Absolutely nothing of the kind can be detected in the tiny shard preserved by Tomlinson. Nor is there the least remnant of the (to my mind) superb ending of the original fifth book:

...

We know nothing and can no nothing

                               but

the dance, to dance to a measure

contrapuntally,

                               the tragic foot.

– in which the ‘foot,’ bringing together the main preoccupations of Williams’ later poetry, undoubtedly refers both to a physiological ‘foot’ involved in a mating ‘dance’ and to a ‘foot’ as the metrical focus of poetry.

            But if I think it’s a shame that Tomlinson’s selection omits the new emphasis on the feminine and the imagination, a question arises: are those elements really prominent in the original text, or have I grown accustomed to seeking and finding them there because of scholarly books I have read about Paterson? If I had not read books like Jerome Mazzaro’s William Carlos Williams: The Later Poems[6] and Sherman Paul’s The Music of Survival,[7] would I naturally have thought the fifth book of Paterson belonged in a group of late contemplative poems which includes Asphodel and “The Desert Music”?

            I’m just not sure. What I am prepared to say without hesitation is that cutting out most of the third book is all to the good. I would say the same for the fourth. In fact, in thinking of Paterson as a whole, I can never forget what Samuel Johnson said about Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘none ever wished it longer than it is.’

I guess what I am actually doing is reading the fifth book of Paterson not as an integrated text in itself, but as a collection of ‘links’ or ‘tabs’ evoking echoes of related words and ideas which actually occur in other late works by Williams. My interest is not in the continuous text on the printed page, but in these scattered clues which bring in overtones. To me, those overtones compensate for, in my appreciation actually supersede, the frankly less interesting or less good sections of the actual text.

In other words, for a reader like me who prefers memorably ‘incisive’ to bewilderingly bulky....viewing Williams’ work as a whole, it is true that Less is More. But in order to know what less to read, you have to have first read much more...

--Lloyd Haft

December 2015

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[1] ‘On Translating Gorter’s Lyrics’ (1): http://lhaftblog.blogspot.nl/2014/02/on-translating-gorters-lyrics.html

[2] New York: New Directions. This edition contains an introduction by Randall Jarrell. The selection of the later poems is said to have been made by ‘Mrs. Williams and a committee of editorial advisers.’

[3] New York: New Directions. Though the information given in the front matter on publishing history is formidably complex, I believe myself to have deciphered that this edition as a whole was published in 1963.

[4] Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York etc.: McGraw-Hill, 1981, p. 645.

[5] Mariani, p. 708.

[6] Cornell University Press, 1973.

[7] University of Illinois Press, 1968.

Risen Rock (poem)

Risen Rock[1]

There is no other being than being other

-Carry van Bruggen

1. Viewing an errant boulder on the shore at Dai Kee, Taiwan, I see in it a human face.

Nearing the rock

at last I see its eyes,

seemingly an I’s,

more than of dust that lies,

spray that scatters.

Marker of the morning

where I see it now

it comes to light,

joins me in the going.

2. If the stone’s name is ‘errant,’ the stone is human...

Likeness

nearing mine

above the sea

that never knew to say

but up and under,

up and ever down again.

Stone that earth refused –

earth that gave no ground,

showed no place of peace –

stone arising, weight along with me,

stay me here in light against the wind.

Be along in standing

never to dissolve,

never to resolve

into a wave among the waves.

Open as mine your eye,

open as one the other,

skull and stone one likeness.

Over the unbespoken and asunder,

out of the lightless wallowings

and echoings of ends,

out of the seething settlements

now here:

one seen.

3. ...and obstinate...

Not to save the stone –

I came to see it rise

where I arrive,

rising as I rise against the setting,

the lying of land’s end.

Leaving the very sea behind

to stand and sign and be:

that where we were denied we rise

in countersign and coming:

peer and counterpart.

4. ...and odd.

Stave or stela

staying in this light,

staying more than saying,

rather tall than told,

better with than worded,

rather along. Here beyond proscribing

I am seen in what I see:

over the dumb and boom and doom

of all the sea

and all that was surrounding.

5. The stone will never ask me what I am, or if I am.

Over I stand,

standing ever over.

Behold the stone:

housing not on land,

not in the word-enwalled stockade

but here in overstanding,

here in the not inhering

that is ours,

open that is own.

Standing out against the wind:

here against the setting sun,

here against all setting.

6. Blessed are they that stand.

So be I ever, seeming

in a distance that is near,

apart

and yet a part,

touching on whatever

is to touch

and now is near,

with in waiting,

waiting in the wind

for more of wind.

--Lloyd Haft

October 2015

---

[1] This is my English version of a poem I originally published in Dutch in De gids 2011: 4.

For the Dutch version, see http://www.athenaeum.nl/boek-van-de-nacht/gids-2011-4

For Katie Su’s Chinese version, see http://lhaftblog.blogspot.nl/2015/09/blog-post.html

Me and the Japanese Language

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 29)

Not long ago, one day my wife and I both woke up before dawn.

            ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

            ‘Four-ten.’

            Question and answer were both in Japanese.

            Trivial as that little exchange may sound, to me it was a watershed. It meant that I had finally resumed a focus, picked up a thread, that had been waiting in the margins of my life for sixty years. By having a Japanese-speaking wife and by saying a few words to her in that language, I was fulfilling a wish that I had expressed on another continent at the age of seven.

            My first contact with Japanese was in the mid-1950s in Wisconsin. My parents and I were living in a wooded neighborhood next door to an American scholar, his Japanese wife, and their toddler son. One summer afternoon in their back yard, I was terrifically impressed to hear this American guy suddenly talking Japanese. What he was saying to his wife Akiko might have been no more than ‘Should I take the clothes in now?’ – but to me it was a magical formula, a language of the gods, transforming a banal situation into a scene of timeless color and romance.

            Akiko was the first person to bring me into contact with Chinese characters.[1] One day she sat down with me and read me a story out of a Japanese children’s book, sight-translating from those beautifully illustrated pages with their long vertical lines of exotic script. I felt a terrific envy for her toddler son Karl, who was being brought up to speak and understand Japanese. I suddenly decided to start coming over as often as possible. I actually asked Akiko if she would teach me Japanese ‘together with Karl.’

            Soon afterward, my family moved out of the woods in Wisconsin and into a city in Louisiana. The ambient foreign language became French, and we actually had some awfully superficial French lessons in school, but I soon discovered I was more interested in playing baseball than in studying. Domination by the instincts had begun. Competition. The ‘school of hard knocks.’ The playing field with its straight lines and uniforms. Slugging and scrapping for a place as a ‘big man’ in society. And so it would continue for half a century. But the seeds of timeless fascination, and their association with Japanese, had been sown.

            Perhaps it was, in retrospect, not surprising that the field of study which eventually became my profession – Chinese, has the reputation of being the most difficult of all. Maybe part of my attraction to Chinese – aside from the beautiful poetry and beautiful women – was that it was the intellectual equivalent of a Bowl Game, an arena in which brain could knock heads with brain and only an All-Star had a chance. Physically, I knew I would never be a Babe Ruth. But mentally...

            Some years later, when I was just finishing up as a graduate student at Leiden University in The Netherlands, there was a sudden vacancy in the Chinese Department and I was offered a teaching job. Nobody was more amazed than myself. It had never occurred to me that someday I would ‘use’ my Chinese for anything so worldly as to earn money. I had always assumed someday I would teach Dutch children English for a livelihood and then go home at night to do what I really wanted to do, which was to learn more Chinese.

            I had to decide right away, and I said yes. I have never really regretted that decision, but in the long run it did change my feelings toward the Chinese language. Starting in 1973, I was a full-time staff member in Leiden. In my new job, the pressures that were on me could not have been called serious, but being a perfectionist, I felt under pressure nevertheless. Before long I began to associate the Chinese language itself with the tensions and obligations of the ‘on-the-job’ situation. If I glanced at a Chinese newspaper and could not understand a headline, rather than this being just another interesting challenge, it became a threat. I started to feel guilty for not knowing the language perfectly. After all, I was now a professional, paid teacher! Soon I began, like every bourgeois office clerk or shopgirl, to look forward to the weekend and to be glad when five o’clock rolled around. What I had first loved to do, I now ‘had to’ do.

In the case of Japanese, there never was such a division between my ‘life’ and my ‘self.’ The language itself was never wrenched away from my personal realm of musings and meanings into an alien area of Philistine worries. It remained in a still-possible, still-to-come state, and there it waited for sixty years.

Even that phrase, ‘sixty years,’ is significant here. In Japan as well as China, there   is an ancient tradition of sixty being considered the number of years in one full human life cycle. Not so long ago in Japan, a person celebrating their sixtieth birthday would actually wear clothes or colors symbolically suggesting a baby’s clothes – the idea being that you were being born all over again.

In my own life as I now look back on it, ‘sixty years’ was the period during which I was continually being forced to adapt to society and its demands. When I was about seven, my family moved out of the woods and into the town with its herd and its hedges. When I was sixty-seven, my wife joined me in retirement and there was no longer any definite ‘public’ pressure in either of our lives. Surely it was no coincidence that right after turning sixty-eight, I suddenly felt a mighty impulse to get back to learning Japanese.

Is Japanese difficult to learn? According to Arthur Waley, one of the most famous translators from Oriental literature, not so very. In the introduction to his little-known Japanese Poetry: The ‘Uta,’ he writes: ‘The translations in this book are chiefly intended to facilitate the study of the Japanese text; for Japanese poetry can only be rightly enjoyed in the original. And since the classical language has an easy grammar and limited vocabulary, a few months should suffice for the mastering of it.’[2]

Well, that sounds easy enough! But as other contexts show, Arthur Waley was not above indulging in a bit of intellectual show-offery. In his preface toThe Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces, he actually says: ‘Despite the fact that in this book I translate from Chinese, Japanese, Ainu, Mongol and Syriac, I do not want to give the impression that I am a master of many languages. Chinese and Japanese I do know fairly well...’[3]

For a different and perhaps more plausible opinion, we may turn to the wise words of Arthur Rose-Innes, whose dictionary and textbooks have guided generations of students. In the ‘introductory remarks’ to Part II of his five-part First Steps in Japanese Reading, he writes: ‘As many of the characters and combinations of the characters may be read in more than one way the beginner may be surprised at the amount of guessing that has to be done: but it is well that he should exercise from the very beginning that faculty of guessing aright which, as Chamberlain says, is a sine qua non to the student of Japanese all through his career...Before going very far the student may come to the conclusion that the Japanese written language, though very interesting, is one immense muddle; and that, in the absence of logic, the only way to learn it, is by the process known as muddling through. Be that as it may, let him be sure that he will not make much progress except by hard work and perseverance.’

In short: ‘Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers!’ This is a far cry from Waley’s suggestion that one need only ‘learn the Japanese syllabary and some (perhaps about 600) of the commoner Chinese characters’ to be able to ‘use the native texts.’[4] By the way, a Japanese schoolchild would be well into the fifth grade of elementary school before being officially required to know as many as 600 characters. Let me just add in passing that ‘the Japanese syllabary,’ an alphabet-like series of phonetic signs used to spell words or parts of words, itself comprises more than a hundred symbols which must be learned by rote...

As for grammar and syntax, I think few students would disagree with the description, laid down in 1928 by G. B. Sansom in his Historical Grammar of Japanese, of ‘...some obscure characteristic in Japanese speech which impels those who use it to pile one redundant verb upon another. It is a feature which will not have escaped the notice of those who listen to orations where sentence after sentence ends with some phrase like de aru de arimasu, which literally stands for “being-is-being-is-is,” and can be adequately rendered by the one word “is” in English.’[5]

Sometimes the grammar seems difficult not because it is a ‘muddle’ but for the opposite reason: that it is somehow burdensomely logical and over-analytical, as when ‘I’ve been to Kyoto’ comes out as ‘the fact of having gone to Kyoto exists,’ or at the table when ‘please pass me the salt’ becomes ‘do bestow getting the salt.’

And what about the phenomenally complex problem of the so-called polite forms, such that not only the choice of words but even the grammatical forms constantly depend on one’s judgment as to the status relations between oneself and the interlocutor? In all the Japanese textbooks I have used or browsed, my favorite quote on this is: ‘Another common honorific verb is irassharu, which has more honorific value than precise verbal meaning. It expresses the vague idea of the existence of a person either in motion or at rest and consequently can be translated “to go,” “to come,” or “to be”.’[6]

On the other hand, some of the difficulties students complain about really are rather exaggerated. For example: remembering the Japanese names of the days of the week. True, at first sight kayoobi and suiyoobi don’t seem inherently very suggestive of ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Wednesday.’ But this can be overcome by simply carrying out a few simple steps. First, take a course in French and stick with it until you know the days of the week by heart. This will give you the information that Tuesday, mardi, has the mythological or astrological association of being ‘Mars day’ while Wednesday, mercredi, is associated with Mercury, etc. Knowing these links between the ancient European gods and the successive days will turn out to be crucial in getting the Japanese weekdays right.

Next, go to your local university library, check out the second volume of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, make a photocopy of page 262, ignore the top half of the chart, and memorize the table of associations of the Ancient Chinese ‘elements’ with the ‘planets.’ Keep in mind that the English name of each ‘planet’ corresponds to the ancient Roman god of the same name, which you now have learned in French. From there, you can easily work out that in ancient East Asian tradition, Mars is associated with ‘fire’ and Mercury with ‘water,’ and so on.

After that, every time you see the Japanese days of the week written in Chinese characters, you will plainly see that kayoobi is the ‘fire’ or ‘Mars’ day, hence mardi or Tuesday; suiyoobi is the ‘water’ or ‘Mercury’ day, thus mercredi or Wednesday, and so on. It remains true that in spoken Japanese ka is not the ordinary word for ‘fire,’ nor sui for ‘water’; these are actually ancient Chinese words in an archaic Japanese transcription, but this is nit-picking. Ignore it. Ignore also the fact that the element yoo in these words is written with a distinct Chinese character which Japanese-English dictionaries define simply as ‘part of the names of the days of the week.’ Actually, historically it means ‘bright,’ so that Tuesday is actually ‘fire’s bright day’ and so on.

A breeze, isn’t it?

            Another problem, this time definitely a real one, is how to read Japanese names aloud when they are written, as they usually are, in Chinese characters. Since characters ordinarily have more than one possible pronunciation depending on meaning, custom and who knows what else...how can you be sure you are reading a person’s name correctly?

            The bad news here is that quite often you simply can’t. The good news is that neither can the Japanese. Basically, you just have to know, whether by being tipped off by an insider or...though this is not foolproof...by looking the name up in one of the special name dictionaries giving attested readings of attested names.

            Traditionally in Europe, the advice given to students of Japanese was to first learn enough Russian to be familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, then find a way to buy a copy of the 1207-page Slovar’ Yaponskikh Imyon i Famil’yiy (Dictionary of Japanese names and surnames) published in Moscow in 1958, and then...look up to your heart’s content!

            English-speaking readers got what seemed like a big break in 1972 with the publication of P. G. O’Neill’s Japanese Names: A Comprehensive Index by Characters and Readings. But the author himself in his preface says: ‘There is no final or complete solution to the problems of reading Japanese names written in Chinese characters. Such characters usually have special name readings which...have to be learned separately. Virtually all these characters have more than one recognized name reading, and may have other unpredictable ones as well...It is therefore not surprising that, faced with such complexity, the Japanese should regard possible but mistaken readings with equanimity. It is usually only in speech, however, that they have to commit themselves to a particular reading of a name, for, when writing in their own language, they can leave the name in the obscurity of its characters.’[7]

            O’Neill’s dictionary is ‘only’ 359 fine-print pages long. So far I have never been disappointed in using it, but still, I keep the Russian tome at hand just in case.

            Well, to sum up after all these by-ways...yes, Japanese really is difficult!

            Then the question is, at least in some people’s minds...I know because they have asked me...why do you want to spend your retirement working at anything so difficult?

            The answer is that in studying Japanese, I am pursuing my own dream. I am not straining to fulfill someone else’s. Undoubtedly, by ordinary academic standards my knowledge of the language is still ludicrously inadequate, but my dream is not subject to limitation by other people’s notions of ‘adequacy.’ There is no particular level that I need to attain. If I can say ‘Should I take the clothes in now,’ I am already doing fine. If I can say ‘four-ten in the morning’ to my wife now, I am back where I was with Akiko sixty years ago. I am back home in the realm of the timeless...

--Lloyd Haft

August 2015

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[1] Akiko and her esoteric or ‘archetypical’ role in my life have already figured in a previous post on this blog called ‘When Is Bamboo Where?’ – see http://lhaftblog.blogspot.nl/2014/04/when-is-bamboo-where.html

[2] London : George Allen and Unwin, 1976, p. 12. Originally published in 1919.

[3] London : George Allen and Unwin, 1963, p. 8.

[4] Introduction to Japanese Poetry, p. 12.

[5] G. B. Sansom, An Historical Grammar of Japanese. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928, p. 208.

[6] Serge Elisséef, Edwin O. Reischauer and Takehiko Yoshihashi, Elementary Japanese for College Students, Part II: Vocabularies, grammar and notes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, p. 63.

[7] New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1972/1979, p. vii.