Fandom Snowflake 01: Self-Rec
It's that time of the year again! ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge time, that is. Hello to anyone who's randomly drifting by.
If you want to read about: translations, Japanese language stuff, intertextual rubbish - clicky! I talk less about my fics (of which I've picked 2) and more about the background behind their canons and how they're consumed: rakugo stories and the Tale of Heike.
A country with no mirrors (昭和元禄落語心中 | Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu)
The moment Rakugo Shinjuu ended, I knew that if I were ever to write fic in it, it'd take some work. For the uninitiated, the show's premise is largely centred around rakugo performers: rakugo being a comic storytelling art. For me, at least, every episode and every story relies so heavily on some callout to rakugo that it'd be impossible to not pay homage to some kind of source material.
Rakugo, for all that it's not exactly a hyper-popular artform, is pretty accessible - the long-running TV comedy show Shoten is primarily run by rakugo-ka, and there have been dramas by big Johnny's Entertainment names like Tiger and Dragon which are genuinely good. That said, it's spoken art, and my Japanese is nowhere near good enough anymore to keep up. There are a couple of reasons why it's pretty hard to keep up:
&c. &c. Fortunately, there are lots and lots of collections of seed stories, and I picked a few up in a fit of yuletide-induced hay fever. I ended up choosing Matsuyama Kagami entirely incidentally and - no lie - in large part because it's one of the shorter pieces. DO NOT TRANSLATE ON A DEADLINE, FOLKS.
In a way that you get with fairy-tales, it was really humbling and education to learn why a story is still a classic years and years after it was first told. Matsuyama Kagami is not only psychologically compelling (hey, people look into mirrors and interpret their own reflections!), it also plays on a certain kind of Pandora's Box logic - being given a gift of a type of double-edge blade.
Long story short: translating rakugo is a tonne of fun and a really interesting exercise in voice and dynamic range. I might do more!
I also realise I haven't actually... presented a straight translation of Matsuyama Kagami, so that's probably another post soon.
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As Above, So Below (平家物語 | The Tale of the Heike)
Here's another translation-heavy one, but in a very different way. I'm going to borrow some Western classics terms here with the caveat that they don't map completely correctly. The Tale of Heike is a work of quasi-historical epic literature in the same general vein as, say, the Iliad or the Odyssey: it was originally performed, and current-day manuscripts are based off of transcriptions from different performing lineages. It's epic poetry, except written in a more prose-like way. It's a real warrior's romp - it recounts the war between the Heike/Taira and Genji/Minamoto clans towards the end of the aristocratic Heian era. It's the perfect sort of segue from court culture a la the more famous Tale of Genji into the warring-states shitshow that's to come. It sits at that tipping point where the imperial system loses control to the up-and-coming shogunate. It's really, really fun.
I used no translated lines from the original for this IN SPACE AU, but researching for it was a blast: there are so many gloriously good lines and characters, and it's all written in classical Japanese. Where rakugo is Edo-era and modern colloquialisms, Heike is bungo and Heian-era references.
Bungo is so much fun to read. It's not kanbun - which is basically classical Chinese annotated in such a way that it can be read by Japanese intellectuals. To be unscientific, it's more Japanese in flavour, and reading well-written stuff like Genji and Heike is seriously satisfying, like decoding a well-designed puzzle. I wrote a post, long ago, about translating the opening lines of Heike that explains things a little better than this flailery I'm doing right now.
Anyway, one of the main Heike translations - the one you'll most often see in bookstores - is the Royall Tyler translation. Royall Tyler is... I don't know how to describe this man. Godly? He's a gift, I think: that's what I'd say. His translations are technically solid, but the real superlative quality of his work is the artistry behind his words. In fic and fandom, we're all very happy when we read someone who can write in the pastiche of the original canon, or who can imitate an author's voice - historical fandoms, for example, or fic for Le Guin's work. That's what Tyler has in spades: the ability to translate not just the words but the art.
I'm by no means a Western classics person, but if you've read Robert Fagles' translations of the Iliad/Odyssey and compared it against translations by the likes of Lattimore, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's not that other translations are quantitatively worse: there's just a qualitative goodness, like reading poetry in motion. My wonderful recip![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
maat_seshat noted in their letter that Tyler's translation requires concentration to read because of it, and that's very true! But it's so worth it.
Besides: the Heike, even in its performed incarnation, was never performed all at one go. Or even halfway at one go! Certain favoured chapters/scenes/what have you were more done than others. It took money to hire biwa hoshi priests to come sing for you. So, if you're reading it, don't feel like you have to power through it like a book. I can't even think of the number of times I've fallen asleep on copies of Shakespeare only to be riveted by stage performances of the same material.
(Segue: if you want a great combination of ghost story + biwa hoshi performing Heike? Go watch Mimi-nashi Hoichi from Kwaidan.)
As Above, So Below goes on and tries to pick up this epic account, one that I primarily accessed in translation, and to plop it in outer space. It's a little bit crazy. But one of the primary characters in early sections of the tale is Taira no Shigemori, and for him alone it was worth the effort. There's a WHOLE OTHER PIMP POST coming about this guy, but I'm going to riff off of what I said about rakugo stories and make crazy hands about character archetypes.
Remember, Heike is historical fiction: while there's plenty of exaggeration and invention, it's based off of events and people that are supposed to be real. In some pretty major ways, it's early fanfiction, right? We modern fans go out and we pluck out the skeleton of what makes a character and we invent a bunch of shit to tell new stories. But there's still this idea that characters have an archetypal backbone, and with Shigemori there's an archetype for his time: he's the gentleman-warrior, the scholar-official, the son of his father and the son of his emperor. I don't think any classical text has made me jump around shouting, but Heike did it with Shigemori. And so I think I'm really lucky to have grabbed this assignment and for Heike to now be canonical on AO3. Here's to hoping there's more coming to the fandom!
snowflake_challenge time, that is. Hello to anyone who's randomly drifting by.If you want to read about: translations, Japanese language stuff, intertextual rubbish - clicky! I talk less about my fics (of which I've picked 2) and more about the background behind their canons and how they're consumed: rakugo stories and the Tale of Heike.
A country with no mirrors (昭和元禄落語心中 | Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu)
The moment Rakugo Shinjuu ended, I knew that if I were ever to write fic in it, it'd take some work. For the uninitiated, the show's premise is largely centred around rakugo performers: rakugo being a comic storytelling art. For me, at least, every episode and every story relies so heavily on some callout to rakugo that it'd be impossible to not pay homage to some kind of source material.
Rakugo, for all that it's not exactly a hyper-popular artform, is pretty accessible - the long-running TV comedy show Shoten is primarily run by rakugo-ka, and there have been dramas by big Johnny's Entertainment names like Tiger and Dragon which are genuinely good. That said, it's spoken art, and my Japanese is nowhere near good enough anymore to keep up. There are a couple of reasons why it's pretty hard to keep up:
- Puns form the basis of a lot of humour, and if your vocabulary can't cope, you're not going to get the joke
- Stories use colloquialisms (and old ones!) and funny speech patterns: after all, one guy is performing multiple people
- A live retelling is going to be retold in a way that's funny for its audience, and that's going to involve modern references that can be hard to get without context
&c. &c. Fortunately, there are lots and lots of collections of seed stories, and I picked a few up in a fit of yuletide-induced hay fever. I ended up choosing Matsuyama Kagami entirely incidentally and - no lie - in large part because it's one of the shorter pieces. DO NOT TRANSLATE ON A DEADLINE, FOLKS.
In a way that you get with fairy-tales, it was really humbling and education to learn why a story is still a classic years and years after it was first told. Matsuyama Kagami is not only psychologically compelling (hey, people look into mirrors and interpret their own reflections!), it also plays on a certain kind of Pandora's Box logic - being given a gift of a type of double-edge blade.
Long story short: translating rakugo is a tonne of fun and a really interesting exercise in voice and dynamic range. I might do more!
I also realise I haven't actually... presented a straight translation of Matsuyama Kagami, so that's probably another post soon.
---
As Above, So Below (平家物語 | The Tale of the Heike)
Here's another translation-heavy one, but in a very different way. I'm going to borrow some Western classics terms here with the caveat that they don't map completely correctly. The Tale of Heike is a work of quasi-historical epic literature in the same general vein as, say, the Iliad or the Odyssey: it was originally performed, and current-day manuscripts are based off of transcriptions from different performing lineages. It's epic poetry, except written in a more prose-like way. It's a real warrior's romp - it recounts the war between the Heike/Taira and Genji/Minamoto clans towards the end of the aristocratic Heian era. It's the perfect sort of segue from court culture a la the more famous Tale of Genji into the warring-states shitshow that's to come. It sits at that tipping point where the imperial system loses control to the up-and-coming shogunate. It's really, really fun.
I used no translated lines from the original for this IN SPACE AU, but researching for it was a blast: there are so many gloriously good lines and characters, and it's all written in classical Japanese. Where rakugo is Edo-era and modern colloquialisms, Heike is bungo and Heian-era references.
Bungo is so much fun to read. It's not kanbun - which is basically classical Chinese annotated in such a way that it can be read by Japanese intellectuals. To be unscientific, it's more Japanese in flavour, and reading well-written stuff like Genji and Heike is seriously satisfying, like decoding a well-designed puzzle. I wrote a post, long ago, about translating the opening lines of Heike that explains things a little better than this flailery I'm doing right now.
Anyway, one of the main Heike translations - the one you'll most often see in bookstores - is the Royall Tyler translation. Royall Tyler is... I don't know how to describe this man. Godly? He's a gift, I think: that's what I'd say. His translations are technically solid, but the real superlative quality of his work is the artistry behind his words. In fic and fandom, we're all very happy when we read someone who can write in the pastiche of the original canon, or who can imitate an author's voice - historical fandoms, for example, or fic for Le Guin's work. That's what Tyler has in spades: the ability to translate not just the words but the art.
I'm by no means a Western classics person, but if you've read Robert Fagles' translations of the Iliad/Odyssey and compared it against translations by the likes of Lattimore, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's not that other translations are quantitatively worse: there's just a qualitative goodness, like reading poetry in motion. My wonderful recip
maat_seshat noted in their letter that Tyler's translation requires concentration to read because of it, and that's very true! But it's so worth it. Besides: the Heike, even in its performed incarnation, was never performed all at one go. Or even halfway at one go! Certain favoured chapters/scenes/what have you were more done than others. It took money to hire biwa hoshi priests to come sing for you. So, if you're reading it, don't feel like you have to power through it like a book. I can't even think of the number of times I've fallen asleep on copies of Shakespeare only to be riveted by stage performances of the same material.
(Segue: if you want a great combination of ghost story + biwa hoshi performing Heike? Go watch Mimi-nashi Hoichi from Kwaidan.)
As Above, So Below goes on and tries to pick up this epic account, one that I primarily accessed in translation, and to plop it in outer space. It's a little bit crazy. But one of the primary characters in early sections of the tale is Taira no Shigemori, and for him alone it was worth the effort. There's a WHOLE OTHER PIMP POST coming about this guy, but I'm going to riff off of what I said about rakugo stories and make crazy hands about character archetypes.
Remember, Heike is historical fiction: while there's plenty of exaggeration and invention, it's based off of events and people that are supposed to be real. In some pretty major ways, it's early fanfiction, right? We modern fans go out and we pluck out the skeleton of what makes a character and we invent a bunch of shit to tell new stories. But there's still this idea that characters have an archetypal backbone, and with Shigemori there's an archetype for his time: he's the gentleman-warrior, the scholar-official, the son of his father and the son of his emperor. I don't think any classical text has made me jump around shouting, but Heike did it with Shigemori. And so I think I'm really lucky to have grabbed this assignment and for Heike to now be canonical on AO3. Here's to hoping there's more coming to the fandom!
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We read about the Tale of Heike in 8th grade but it was like the two-page super-summation version. /o\ So...yeah.
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I've started Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu some time ago but I never got around to finish it :\ hepfully this year I'll have time for it, your words sure were inspiring :)
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