A poem for the first day of spring - We had a drinking party to admire the peonies

Drinking with Friends Amongst the Blooming Peonies

We had a drinking party
To admire the peonies.
I drank cup after cup till
I was drunk. Then to my shame
I heard the flowers whisper,
“What are we doing, blooming
For these old alcoholics?”

Liu Yu Hsi (772-842)

Tr. Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: 100 More Poems from the Chinese

A poem for the last day of winter - Do you know what time it is?

Winter Night

It is late in the Winter night.
I am absorbed in a book
And forget to go to bed.
My wife takes my lamp and says,
“Do you know what time it is?”

Yuan Mei (1716-1797)

Tr. Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: 100 More Poems from the Chinese

"The greatest period of women writers in the history of any literature"

So says Kenneth Rexroth about Heian Japan, 794-1192. This is the period of Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, Sei Shonagan's Pillow Book, and a quantity of poems that is hard to fathom, almost all of them in the five-line tanka stanza. How do specialists in the period keep them all straight?

Here is one of Lady Murasaki's poems, from the late 10th century:

This life of ours would not cause you sorrow
if you thought of it as like
the mountain cherry blossoms
which bloom and fade in a day.

Yes, well, easier said than done.

If I skip ahead to the 17th century, when the haiku makes its appearance, not only are there no shortage of poems by women, but two of the best known haiku are by little girls. This one was written by Den Sute-Jo when she was six. Yes, as per A. A. Milne, when she was six:

A snowy morning
Everywhere II, II, II
The tracks of clogs.

That's pretty clever.

So what were women writers up to in the West during the classic period of Japanese literature? That's a trick question - what was anyone up to? It was the Dark Ages, for pity's sake. At least there's the example of Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century.

I'm with Virginia Woolf - the centuries of waste of women's talents is an indictment of Western civilization.* Make yourself a timeline. Start with Sappho in the 6th century B.C.E. Hildegard is next, I think, a gap of 1,700 years. We need another 200 years to get to Christine de Pisan. Things start to improve a bit in the 16th century - Marguerite de Navarre, Gaspara Stampa, Mary Sidney, St. Teresa de Avila. Not exactly parity, but real change. Who do we have in the 17th century? Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Madame de La Fayette's The Princess of Clèves, Madame de Sévigné. Aphra Behn, I guess, although I think she was a hack.

Meanwhile, in Japan, 6 year old girls were writing classic poems.

Translation are by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi, Women Poets of Japan, also published as The Burning Heart.

* Western civilization also has its good points.

Emperors, Princesses, Prime Ministers - high ranking classical Japanese poets

So last week in my note on Léopold Senghor I mentioned the rare but not unheard of phenomenon of statesman-poets. The briefest attention to classical Japanese poetry reveals that it was not merely common for Japanese rulers and courtiers to write poetry, but it was virtually a duty of office. The great Japanese poetry anthologies like the Manyoshu can contain thousands of tiny little poems. Many of them are by members of the court, generals, provincial governors, Shoguns.

One might be suspicious of the quality of the poems of emperors, or the reasons they are anthologized. Power might have more weight than merit. Could be. Here's the Emperor Uda, who ruled from 880 to 897:

Like a wave crest
Escaped and frozen,
One white egret
Guards the harbor mouth.

from One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, tr. Kenneth Rexroth.

That seems pretty great to me. It looks like just one idea, one precisely accurate visual metaphor. In a sense, I'm completely wrong about that. Most of these poems have, for example, Buddhist interpretations which are entirely opaque to me.

This is a minor example of what I was talking about yesterday. I know so little about Japanese literature that a single 150 page book is full of revelations. Imagine what I would learn if I read two books, or three.

The return on investment of literature

From time to time over the years, restless in spirit, dissatisfied with the limits of earthly existence, I have been tempted to switch my attention to Asian literature, meaning, mostly, Chinese and Japanese. The Book of Songs, The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Basho and Li Po. I know so little about Asian literature. The more I fill in my knowledge of Western literature, over the course of many years, the larger the gap becomes, and the more it niggles at me.

I sound like a spiritual seeker, hoping to refresh my soul in traditions not my own. But no, the fact is that my return on investment would be higher if I switched to Asian literature. It might require a high initial investment – the history is unknown, the names of things are strange, the aesthetic standards are unfamiliar. Diminishing returns would kick in at some point. But for a long time, everything would be novel and exciting. Investment here means time and concentration. Return means knowledge, delight, curiosity fulfilled.

What I’m calling diminishing returns – the novel I’m reading is just like other novels I have read, the history I’m studying is mostly full of ideas I have already encountered – is actually a crucial step towards real understanding, towards specialization. Great scholars repeat themselves, circle around the a single set of facts or single author, searching for new insights. But that will never be me, so at some point, I would shift my attention to something else. I don’t plan to write about 19th century Western literature for the rest of my life, either.

Why do I say “switch” to Asian literature? Because for the Neurotic Reader, everything is a project. Lists of books, background history, modern essayists. Jonathan Spence on China, Donald Keene on Japan. Perhaps this post will serve as a goad to myself – don’t read so neurotically. Dip in, wander around, use the lists for inspiration. A certain amount of neurosis is probably necessary to actually finish a long, complex book life The Tale of Genji. But some moderation, please.

I do want to insist on the value of specialization, even for amateurs. Spending a year or two reading nothing but classical Greek literature is a different experience than scattering the books over a lifetime. Very valuable, very satisfying. But there are limits to our energy, and interest, and time.

I go out of the darkness
Onto a road of darkness
Lit only by the far off
Moon on the edge of the mountains.

Lady Izumi Shikibu, late 10th or early 11th century, translated by Kenneth Rexroth.

Now it turns out I'm going to Japan

Although there ain't no guarantee uh nothin', it looks like I will go to Tokyo, On Business, for basically the entire month of August. What a wonderful opportunity, etc., etc. But Japanese banks don't fly a person halfway around the world to retrace the steps of Basho.

I've never been farther west than San Francisco, so this really is a good thing, although it will be, mostly, work and more work. I worry that it will impact my posting. No, who cares about that, I worry it will impact my reading.

No formal reading list this time, although I am looking at some of Kenneth Rexroth's translations of classical Japanese poems, and I just finished Christopher Benfey's The Great Wave, a superb account of the cultural interactions between Japan and the United States (New England, really) in the late 19th century. Maybe more on that book later.

I'm also trying to teach myself Japanese. Ha ha ha ha! Teach myself - ho ho - Japanese! Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, ku, jū. Hajimemashite. Amateur Reader desu. Dozo kory-something. That was from memory - am I learning? Is it more polite to mangle your host's language with the best intentions, or to stick with English?

A 9th century poem, by Ariwara No Narihira, from Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese:

I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.