Prelude
| 散るをいとふ世にも人にもさきがけて 散るこそ花と吹く小夜嵐 -三島 由紀夫の辞世、1970 |
A small night storm blows Saying ‘falling is the essence of a flower’ Preceding those who hesitate -Death poem of Mishima Yukio, 1970 |
Because this territory in my internal universe is continually shifting, I’ve learned to look for patterns and rhythms in the chaos that I can use as guides when I can’t locate steady ground. So I make maps from my memories. I make my maps out of words and stories.
-Jacks Ashley McNamara, from Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness: A Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds (Tenth Anniversary Edition), 2013
Cherry
I don’t include all of the front matter here. In the actual book, you can see the title page, disclaimer, the CC BY-SA license terms, and the dedication listed. I don’t include those here; it would feel out of place.
But I do include a selection of quotations with each book. I find that using little excerpts like this to preface the story is something that can help a lot with establishing the mood and themes of the story, providing emotional texture. I leave the interpretation of these excerpts to the reader; I provide questions, not answers.
I try to cite my sources for these excerpts as clearly as I can. When the source material was in another language, whenever possible I try to include the original language as well as the translation. There are a few reasons for this. One is that I try to be respectful to the author of the work, and I think this is an important part of that. Presenting it only in English would, I think, suggest that I think the translated form is the authoritative version, and it’s not.
In this case, though, it also contributes to the mood in itself. The idea of translation and of the difficulty and limitation inherent to it, the way that nuances and shades of meaning are lost when moving ideas from one language, one format, one perspective to another is something that plays a major role in this story’s theming. The translated form of this poem does not capture the entirety of the original poem’s structure, meaning, or rhythm.
If even just trying to translate a single poem loses so much nuance, how can one person ever hope to translate the whole of their experience of the world, with all its context and history and personal meaning and interpretation, into something another could understand?