Ueda Akinari (1734-1809), scholar and poet, is remembered for his collection of nine stories, the "Ugetsu Monogatari," first published in 1776. It has remained among the best-known works in the Japanese classical tradition, and was made even more famous by Kenji Mizoguchi's 1953 film version.
Among the reasons for its high literary standing is its "poetic style, its eerie beauty, and its skillful use of literary archetypes." These are qualities enumerated by Leon Zolbrod in his 1974 translation of the complete work. The devices of traditional poetry and drama are masterfully employed by Akinari and the diction is of the utmost elegance.
This style has remained much admired. Junichiro Tanizaki considered the first story in the collection, "Shiramine," to be "an exemplary piece of Japanese prose, employing the special strengths of our language." Yukio Mishima found a later story, "The Carp of My Dreams," to be "the ultimate in the poetry that Akinari attempted."
Both of these writers are, of course, prime stylists themselves and, in their separate ways, attempted to recreate the spirit of the classics in fictional form -- precisely the aim of Akinari. Tanizaki and Mishima were also fond of the past, and of employing whole networks of references to historical places and persons. Both, likewise, were creators of what has been called a "jeweled" style -- one replete with uncommon terms and complicated diction.
Akinari excelled in such qualities. So much so that his translators are often presented with major problems. The diction of "Shiramine" was praised by Tanizaki for reading smoothly without subjects. English, however, requires, at a minimum, the use of pronouns. Such is the ambiguity of the original, that Zolbrod could accurately present the story as a first-person narrative, and Anthony Chambers, the present translator, can equally accurately present it in the third-person singular.
Many fine translators from the Japanese have rendered Akinari in English. Among them have been Lafcadio Hearn, the late Dale Saunders, William Sibley and Makoto Ueda. To their number ought now be added Chambers, who has here given us a translation of the most subtle transparency.
Of it he says: "I have tried to leave Akinari alone as much as possible without doing violence to my mother tongue." He has looked for, and found, ways to convey in English the qualities of Akinari's prose.
Here is the older standard translation of a part of the preface. "By chance, I happened to have some idle tales with which to entertain you, and as they took shape and found expression, with crying pheasants and quarreling dragons, the stories came to form a slipshod compilation. But you who pick up this book to read must by no means take the stories to be true."
And here is Chambers' new translation: "I, too, have scribbled down some idle tales for a time of peace and contentment. A pheasant cries, dragons fight. I know that these tales are flawed and baseless; no one who skims them will find them believable."
The needless elaboration and repetition of the former example find no place in the new translation. Five lines are reduced to three and sentences flow unimpeded. Chambers has remarked upon "the ultimate impossibility of a close approximation," but he has here (and in the rest of the book) achieved something like it.
When his translations of three of these stories appeared in their initial versions in the Haruo Shirane-edited anthology "Early Modern Japanese Literature" (2002), readers knew that they were seeing work of unusual quality and hoped that Chambers would translate the entire work. He has now done so and has found inventive and practical ways to offer the necessary notes and background material. The result is a shining new version of a living Japanese classic.
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