Takeda 1

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

Takeda 2

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

Takeda 3

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,

Takeda 4

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

Takeda 5

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,”

Takeda 6

“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

Takeda 7

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

Takeda 8

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.

Takeda 9

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

Takeda 10

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

Takeda 11

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

Takeda 12

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

Takeda 13

(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

Takeda 14

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

Takeda 15

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

Takeda 16

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

Takeda 17

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

Takeda 18

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

Takeda 19

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

Takeda 20

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

Takeda 21

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

Takeda 22

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

Takeda 23

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

Takeda 24

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.

Works Cited

“Amaterasu omikami.” Kokugo dai jiten. 1981 ed. Tokyo:

Shogakukan.

Bayley, John. Housman’s Poems. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1992.

Takeda 25

Bownas, Geoffrey, and Anthony Thwaite, eds. and trans. The

Penguin Book of Japanese Verse. Harmondsworth:

Penguin

Books, 1987.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding

Poetry.

4th ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976.

Cirlot, J. E. A Dictionary of Symbols. 2nd ed. London:

Routledge, 1971.

Cooper, Lane, ed. A Concordance to the Poems of William

Wordsworth. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1911.

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. 3rd ed. New

York:

New Directions, 1966.

Erdman, David V., ed. A Concordance to the Writings of

William

Blake. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Hijikata, Tatsuzo. Shropshire no wakoudo. Tokyo: Kobundo,

1940.

Honda, Heihachiro. The Poetry of Yosano Akiko. Tokyo:

The Hokuseido Press, 1957.

Housman, A. E. Collected Poems. London: Penguin Books,

1956.

Ingram, William, and Kathleen Swaim, eds. A Concordance to

Milton’s English Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.

Takeda 26

Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings. 2nd ed. Vol.3.

The Hague: Mouton, 1981. 8 vols. 1966-87.

Kawamoto, Koji. Nihon shiika no dento. Tokyo: Iwanami

shoten,

1991.

Kawamura, Hatsue. Tanka no miryoku. Tokyo: Shichigatsudo,

1992.

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Poetry, Drama, Criticism.

Vol. 2. New York: Holt, Reinehart and Winston, 1984.

2 vols.

Leggett, B. J. Housman’s Land of Lost Content. Knoxville:

The University of Tennessee Press, 1970.

---. The Poetic Art of A. E. Housman. Lincoln and London:

University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

Lotman, Jurij. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann

Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1977.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Crise de vers.” Œuvres complètes.

Ed.

Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard,

1945.

360-68.

Okina, Kumi. “Midaregami no seiritsu made.” Kokubungaku

Kenkyu 29 (1953): 12-25.

Ozawa, Masao, ed. Kokin waka shu. Nihon koten bungaku

Takeda 27

zenshu

7. Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1971.

Pound, Ezra. Selected Poems 1908-1959. London: Faber and

Faber, 1977.

Savan, David. An Introduction to C. S. Peirce’s Full

System of Semeiotic. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic

Circle, 1988.

“Seito.” Encyclopedia Genre Japonica. 1973 ed.

Seki, Ryoichi. “Dento shiika to gendai shi.” Koza Nihon

gendaishi-shi. Vol.1. Tokyo: Ubun shoin, 1973. 4

vols.

3-31.

Sparrow, John. Introduction. Housman 7-18.

Suzuki, Tomio. A. E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad shochu І.

Tokyo:

Aratake shuppan, 1982.

Takeda, Noriko. A Flowering Word: The Modernist Expression

in

Stéphane Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, and Yosano Akiko. New

York:

Peter Lang, 2000.

Thwaite, Anthony. Introduction: A Poetry for Everyone.

Bownas

and Thwaite xxxvii-xxxix.

Valdés, Mario J. Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense: Critical

Takeda 28

Studies

of Literature, Cinema, and Cultural History. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Wakita, Haruko. Ten’nou to chusei bunka. Tokyo: Yoshikawa

Koubunkan, 2003.

Yosano, Akiko. Midaregami. Tokyo: Tokyo shinshisha, 1901.