Although I’m not a massive fan of social media and dislike how easy it is to get sucked into sitting in front of a screen, scrolling, I enjoy the rabbit holes that make up the World Wide Web.
This morning, searching for a new audible book for my walks (I’m nearing the end of the fab Relight my Fire, book 4 in the Stranger Times series read narrated by the inimitable Brendan MacDonald) I found myself on the Japan House site.
I’ve never been to Japan. I’d like to go. But I’ve never been.
I roomed with a girl in Oxford who had spent a year or two there teaching English and she was all about the tea ceremonies and the flower arranging and the paper crafting. I worked with a chap in Budapest who had also spent time there – I always thought he had a very Japanese way of walking (if there even is such a thing). And I’m sure I have a first cousin once removed over there. Somewhere.
One of these days I’ll get to visit the land of Hokusi.
In the meantime, I’ll have to content myself with reading about it.
What attracts me are the Japanese words that defy translation, words that would be better off adopted by English in their original form.
Like Kokoro.
Kokoro implies one’s intellectual responses, or, in other situations, implies one’s emotional reactions, and in many cases, it connotes inclusively the mental, emotional and spiritual states of all sentient beings.
A popular internet find is heart-mind.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article by Meera Viswanathan that says:
Kokoro is a comprehensive term in Japanese religion, philosophy and aesthetics often translated as ‘heart’, whose range of meanings includes mind, wisdom, aspiration, essence, attention, sincerity and sensibility. In Buddhist texts and in philosophy, kokoro (or shin in its Sino-Japanese reading) denotes mind, heart or inner nature, the site of human sentience or delusion. By extension, in pre-modern theories of art, kokoro signifies simultaneously the emotional capacity of the artist to respond to the natural world, which ideally catalyzes the act of creation; the parallel ability of an audience to respond to such a work of art and thus indirectly to the experience of the artist; and finally the evaluation of such a work as possessing the ‘right conception’, kokoro ari or alternatively ushin.
Amazon, in describing the 1996 book, Kokoro, by says:
Kokoro, which means “the heart of things,” explores emotions familiar to everyone—love and hate, hope and despair, companionship and loneliness.
Soseki’s book, by the way, has been translated by
In his piece on Kokoro, Professor Emeritus Kimiko Gunji quotes another author Kakuzo Okakura (The Book of Tea) as saying:
Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade, all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of color or design.
I sent this to a translator friend, who made the excellent point that Isaih and Homer would have been relative nobodies if they hadn’t been translated. They also pointed out that ‘translators have to understand a text fully – creative writers don’t always read/know what they’ve written’.
Quoting Pushkin:
Translators are post-horses on the road to civilisation.
I, for one, will be eternally grateful to the likes of Bernard Adams, who makes Hungarian literature accessible in English. And to the WWW rabbit holes that introduce me to the likes of Kokoro.
As I’m no nearer knowing exactly what Kokoro is, I’m going to buy Soseki’s book and see where that takes me.
Further reading
If you’re interested and/or have strong opinions about translations: Walter Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator.
Zakhar Ishov’s 2008 Dissertation: ‘Post-horse of Civilisation’: Joseph Brodsky translating Joseph Brodsky. Towards a New Theory of Russian-English Poetry
