Ruminations on English, Japanese, and haiku.



English and Japanese have completely different vocabularies and grammatical structures. Everyone knows this. Yet what not many are aware of are the imprints that words and thought patterns leave on our minds. Those of us fluent in more than one language tend to think differently depending on the language we choose, and even if the thoughts are the same, their manner of expression is certainly different. In Japanese, with its subject-object-verb structure, the important idea tends to emerge at the end, while in English we tend to get things out in the open earlier, and quite often the end of a sentence amounts to something of an afterthought.

One thing I have realized in the course of translating a great number of haiku for NACOS, interestingly, is that this reverse dynamic also applies to looser poetic expression in which the words spoken may not actually be in the form of proper sentences. Indeed, in a brief poem such as a Haiku, there are typically many very important components, and it would be foolish to claim that only the last line carries the important information, as would be the case in a Japanese sentence. Yet, somehow, even though there is no requirement when translating haiku to modify the order of the lines to adhere to the grammar of English, I always find myself doing so. Things just don’t sound good sometimes unless I do so. Counterintuitively, I often see myself taking a very important point in the Japanese original and putting it at the end of the English translation, even though this is supposedly the way of the Japanese language.

There must be something deeper. The Japanese believe that words are more than just sounds; in their culture, words are often thought to have power on a metaphysical level. If this is the case, the language that holds all those words together may even be said to have a spirit or a soul. Perhaps it is because of the different souls of these languages that one manner of expression fits better than another.