Translation of Takasugi's 4/10 Prison Poem (Second Draft)

Image

Text

(1)孤身在縲紲　 (2)胸間百憂集　 (3)只知有今朝 　(4)不知有明日
(5)曉鴉叫屋上　 (6)旭日透獄窓　 (7)拜之空涕涙　 (8)聞之又斷腸
(9)斷腸非恨冤　(10)涕涙非惜命　(11)外患迫吾君　(12)如何此邦政
　　(13)爲光顕田中君　 (14)録舊製　　　　　 　　 (15)東行生

Translation

(1)Alone in the fetters of a convict,
(2)Within my heart a hundred sorrows gather;
(3)Knowing only there is today's morning,
(4)Not knowing there will be tomorrow's sun.

(5)Daybreak, the sound of crowing on the rooftop,
(6)Rays of dawn seeping through the prison windows --
(7)I prostrate myself and weep empty tears;
(8)I hear, and once more my heart is broken.

(9)Heartbroken, but not grudging this injustice;
(10)Weeping, but not regretting this fate.
(11)With foreign threats pressuring our sovereign,
(12)How can this country's government last?

(13)For Mitsuaki Tanaka (14)Record of an old work (15)Tougyou


Notes

Poem written in the Chinese style, consisting of three separate yet interconnected poems, each in 5 character/4 line form. (i.e. it reads as a whole poem, but each "stanza" also stands on its own.)

In the third month (lunar calendar) of 1864, Takasugi was arrested and thrown into jail at Noyama Prison in Hagi, a castle town of Choshu. Later he was released and put under house arrest -- it wasn't until around August (lunar calendar?) of that year, after the Shimonoseki incident Part II (i.e. retribution doled out by combined forces of American, British, French, and Dutch warships for the 1863 attacks on foreign warships by Choshu), that he was released in order to deal with the resulting mess.

He wrote this poem on April 10th (again, lunar calendar) in the journal he kept while in prison. (It appears he wrote a new poem almost every day.) Later he rewrote this poem onto the back of the fan in the image I've linked to and gave it to a close friend and fellow imperialist from Tosa (yet another domain with somewhat anti-bakufu leanings) named Tanaka Mitsuaki.

(notes extrapolated partly from original link)

(1) 縲紲 refers to the rope used to shackle together prisoners in a line.

(3)-(4) These two lines form a couplet that works way better in Chinese. The translation here is very literal. Not sure if this is the best choice.

(7) This line is a reaction to (6). It was a bit difficult to translate because 空 has several meanings (sky, emptiness, space), all of which could make sense in context. At first I went with sky; dotchan suggested the idea of weeping in vain. 涕涙 literally means "snot and tears" -- it's much more poetic in Chinese.

(8) Again, a reaction, this time to (5). 斷腸 literally translates as "breaking intestines." It's a figurative (and commonly used) term for extreme grief, an equivalent to the English "heartbreak." I originally translated it to just plain "grieve", but dotchan suggested heartbreak, so I thought about it some more and managed to work out how to lead it into the next line.

(9) This line and the next are another couplet, meant to parallel the (7)-(8) couplet. dotchan suggested "hated injustice" in place of my original pure "resenting."

(10) dotchan suggested unafraid of death instead. (惜命 could be interpreted either as regretting fate or (over)valuing life.) I suspect Dot's interpretation is right and it is a shortening of the phrase 可惜身命. Both work in context, however... and the life interpretation is far harder to word, so I'm sticking with regret for now.

(11) 外患 can mean either "external pressure" or "foreign threat." In this case it probably refers to both. 吾 means I/me/my/our, 君 in Chinese usually means gentleman or "mister"... dotchan pointed out that it might refer to the emperor, however, which obviously makes much more sense than my original feeble attempt at making heads or tails out of it.

(12) This line sounds incomplete to me as a Chinese speaker... 如何 usually is "how," or "in what way." . 此 is "this." 邦 means (this) country. 政 is government. I believe he is suggesting the question, "What are we going to do about our country's government?" but the sentence as it stands is incomplete, at least how I'm reading it. (dotchan suggested "How then can this administration reign?", but administration seems a bit off in context.) This sentence needs work. A lot of work.

(13) Pretty self-explanatory (光顕 = Mitsuaki, 田中 = Tanaka), but the ordering bothers me, as it's apparently written as given name/surname rather than the usual surname/given name. I've wondered if it was perhaps meant to be an odd pun, or if it was just a typo on the site, or if it was a mistake in the calligraphy... Not sure.

(14) Since it's a copy of the poem(s) he originally wrote in prison.

(15) 東行 "Tougyou," translating literally as "Eastbound," was one of Takasugi's many pen names/aliases. His favorite, in fact -- it was the name he chose when he ran off to do his monk thing. This is, I believe in fact the name that is used instead of Shinsaku on his memorial stone in Yamaguchi.



SOURCES:

- http://ddb.libnet.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit/ishin/ (in Japanese)
- http://t-susa.cool.ne.jp/sinsaku/kansi3.html (for a "translation" into colloquial Japanese)
- My handy dandy Chinese dictionary, Lin Yutang's Chinese-English dictionary, Babelfish and @nifty (for translating notes), and Jim Breen's online Japanese-English dictionary.

(icky original draft located at squidboyno2)

Suggestions very much appreciated. Me go sleep now. *clunk* (Other poems in the works, hopefully.)

Just a little more tweaking and I will send to paulownia to put up at red-bird.