My Tools

Amida asks me about my tools, online resources and the like. What am I using for this translation, exactly?

Well, today in Mito after another pointless and much begrudged ALT meeting, I went to Kawamata Shoten to pick up 平家物語 Heike Monogatari, which I've wanted to start reading in the original for a while. Of course I found it in the ubiquitous high school study aids section. Which raises a related point.

I first thought of Classical Japanese like Latin, which I majored in. The dead ancestor of a robust modern tongue whose speakers need special training to decipher it, kept alive by the flowering of culture it knew in its heyday as a spoken medium. The little I was able to find on it in the States sort of affirmed this view. There was the translated grammar of Ikeda, and a newer work by Akira and someone else I can't recall now. I assumed, not too far-fetchedly, that these were the tip of an iceberg awaiting me in the original when the Jet program finally bought me a ticket here. I was wrong.

When I first got here, I spent many a Tokyo afternoon after a long train ride from Ibaraki scouring bookstores on my own and pestering polite but annoyed store attendants to find this imputed treasure trove. Over and over again I was merely taken to the same high school study aids section I went to today. After a while I had to realize the truth: that despite it being a sort of natural cultural treasure, the classical language of Japan is by far and large mostly the preoccupation of high school students forced to study it for their entrance examinations.

I knew it was a compulsory subject before I came here, but I was sure I'd find more scholarly works as well. A grammar, I thought, the world for just one thick weapon-sized grammar. But...you just can't find them in bookstores. I persist in believing they do exist, and I know there are scholars of the langauge as such, not just as a vehicle for literature, but you can't get your hands on their works at even the biggest bokstores of the capital.

A lot of reasons for this, of course. Lack of customers, obviously, lack of consumers for the stuff. Though there certainly is a large body of available work ON classical literature to be had. And the texts are easily available through Iwanami bunko at prices to make the Western Classicists weep. Imagine: Homer for five bucks! Agh!
But I think it mianly comes down to the fact that for all the world of pain that the study is for high school kids, it really is much closer to modern Japanese than Latin to English, or even its own contemporary Italian. Or Ancient to Modern Greek for that matter. Or Old English to Modern. It takes training to learn to read, true, but I've come to feel that for actual readers and consumers of the Classical Japanese past, it's close enough not to merit a mediating scholarly apparatus in the form of grammars and the like. When I read it, I know it feels like I'm retranslating it into Modern Japanese terms in my head, though that's dangerous at times, where I assume the current meaning for an originally very different word.

So what do I do? Well, I line up with the kids and buy the same odd vocabulary books with machine-gun toting anime characters, "grammars" by "Madonna", which in Japanese terms means something like "attractive vibrant young woman", here referring to a teacher, and most of all, most of all, the texts annotated for grammar line by line that I've come to love. It's using them that has taught me what I know of the language for the most part.

And this, along with the Iwanami Bunko version based on the Fujiwara Teika text of Sarashina Nikki, with help from the various pieces of my garishly illustrated collection, is what I am using for this project.