Japanese poet, critic, and translator Megumi Moriyama has so far worked on metamorphosing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) into the Japanese and on a ‘back translation’ of Arthur Waley’s poetic rendition of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, in collaboration with her sister, haiku poet and critic Marie Mariya, published by Sayusha. As a poet, Megumi confesses that even her original poems in Japanese are layered with translation across varying texts within and outside her native language. Of her forthcoming poetry collection, she told me, “Perhaps you might say that through translation, I have made a journey into the depths of Japanese language.”
In this interview, I spoke with Megumi, currently in Tokyo, on rendering Virginia Woolf and Waley’s The Tale of Genji into the Japanese; how spiral translation goes beyond back-translations; and the new-age scene of literary translation in Japan.
Author headshot courtesy of Benjamin Parks.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translated Virginia Woolf’s experimental classic The Waves into the Japanese as Nami (2021), published by Hayakawa. Could you speak about your process in rendering a 1931 polyphonic novel set in England by a prose writer known for her stream of consciousness narrative mode with the modern-day Japanophone readership in mind? I heard there was so much hype about it, especially on Japanese book Twitter, as it was the first translation of this novel in almost 50 years.
Megumi Moriyama (MM): The new translation of The Waves was welcomed much more enthusiastically than I had expected. When I posted the announcement on social media, it went viral. And after the publication, the book was immediately put into reprint.
I studied Virginia Woolf as a student, and The Waves was one of my favorites of hers, but I never thought I would have the opportunity to translate it. It was thanks to social media that I got the chance. I tweeted very casually that I was interested in translating The Waves, an editor took notice of it, and the project became a reality.
Let me tell you briefly about the history of Woolf translations in Japan, which began relatively early, in the 1930s, when the author was still alive. The translations were mainly short stories and partial translations of her longer works.
In the 1950s, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves were fully translated, and from 1976 to 1977, an eight-volume collection of her works was published, which included A Writer’s Diary and her critical essays.
In the 2000s, the influence of film and stage adaptations of Woolf’s works and the rise of feminism in Japan, most recently the #MeToo movement, have combined to give her an even wider readership. A Room of One’s Own is notably popular.
The Waves is considered one of Woolf’s most important works, but in Japanese, it was long out of print and was, until this translation, regarded as a “lost masterpiece.”
Its success may be due in part to the fact that I am a poet, and that I am a co-translator of Waley’s The Tale of Genji.
Virginia, in her diary, called The Waves a “play-poem.” The work consists entirely of the monologues of six characters, and poetic prose interludes in between. The writer of “stream of consciousness” pursued an inner truth rather than an outer reality through her experimental new style of writing. Just as the French poetry of Mallarmé and Valéry is called la poésie pure, The Waves could be called a “poetic novel pure.” Many readers found it fitting that a poet has translated this work.
Another reason for the favorable acceptance and interest in the new edition was that my sister and I had just finished our complete translation of Waley’s The Tale of Genji. Woolf was a friend of Waley and she wrote a review of his translation for British Vogue in 1925. (We translated the review into the Japanese and included it in the final volume of our series.)
It was in this context that my new translation attracted much attention and gained a large readership.
AMMD: In collaboration with your sister, Marie Mariya, you have co-written the book of critical essays Lady Murasaki’s Tea Party: The Tale of Genji in Spiral Translation (Kodansha, 2024), where you talked about the experience of ‘back translating’ Arthur Waley’s 1925–33 poetic rendering in English of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century magnum opus, originally written in classical Japanese of the Heian Period. Could you tell us what ‘spiral translation’ is and about your process translating Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji?
MM: The Tale of Genji is one of the oldest “novels” in the world, written by a court lady. It is shorter than Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but not by much, with some 430 characters and spanning nearly 100 years. It is a quintessential work of Japanese literature—if you live in Japan, you definitely study this classic in school.
For my sister and me, it was more than that. We had strong attachments to it and feelings about it from our childhood. We were also deeply inspired by Jungian psychologist Hayao Kawai’s book on Genji.
Then came the idea of translating Waley’s Genji “back” into modern Japanese. I thought that, through working on it, I would be able to reconcile an inner conflict between my Japanese-ness/Asian-ness and my Western-ness/Christianity. By engaging with classical works, I was able to make a journey back to the origins of the Japanese language.
“Spiral translation” is a term we coined in the translation process. Usually, translating from one language to another and then back again to the original language, is called “back-translation”. However, this sounds as if it is a plain back-and-forth between two languages. We did not think that this term applied to our work.
The idea of “spiral translation” derives from the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel’s concept that “things develop in a spiral.” We intended to express the idea that literary texts also evolve, through translations that involve time and space. And since I studied Virginia Woolf, I also had in mind her literary works and those of other modernist writers. In The Waves, for example, the image of an eternal, mythical circle dominates. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” also contains spiral motion, in the form of the gyre. T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” also has circular imagery: “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”
Waley translated a 1000-year-old Japanese Heian period tale into English 100 years ago. We translated it into 21st-century contemporary Japanese. Translation can never be just a flat movement between two points, merely returning to its origins. We created an evolved version of Murasaki’s story. Languages and texts are always in motion, always being generated. Our translated texts also are “knowing the place for the first time.”
AMMD: One of your current projects involves another spiral translation—this time, a re-creating in Japanese of Sawako Nakayasu’s English translation from the oeuvre of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and modernist writer Chika Sagawa. Tell us more about it.
MM: The project has just begun, and I am very thrilled about it. I call it spiral creation because it is not just ‘back translation,’ but re-creating Sawako’s translation text. Sawako won the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation with The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books, 2015). Along with this book, Sawako has published another ‘translation’ of Sagawa’s work, Mouth: Eats Color, which is credited as ‘Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa’ (Rogue Factorial, 2011). As the subtitle of this book, ‘Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals,’ implies, various forms of ‘translation’ are explored in it. Some are precise translations, some are collages of Japanese and English, some are mixed with French, and some are in the style of Chinese poetry. I immediately found a shared spirit to that of my ‘spiral translation.’ When I was a teenager, I used to write poems by mixing words and phrases like that.
That is why I thought it would be fascinating to rewrite or recreate her ‘translation’ in a more creative and free manner. Translation has something in common with writing poetry. And I believe that this creative process, as in our spiral translation of The Tale of Genji, can serve as a way of thinking about translation itself, examining what translation is and what the relationship between translation and creative writing is.
AMMD: Apart from being a translator, you are also a poet with four full-length Japanese poetry collections under your belt, Yume no tezawari (Tangible Dreams) and Midori no ryōbun (Green Zone) among them. A fifth collection is forthcoming, your first in a decade. You wrote this collection during the years of recasting Virginia Woolf and The Tale of Genji for Japanese readers—the poems were written, in your words, as “a journey into the depths of Japanese language … through translation.” Could you tell us how your praxis of ferrying across English and Japanese languages has permeated your original poetry?
MM: Spending four years from morning to midnight completely immersed in a work as colossal as Genji, I had no choice but to undergo a transformation. Every nook and cranny of my being and every minute fiber of my nerves must have been changed. I do not know how it has affected my language, but perhaps the simplest and most obvious change is the inclusion of classical Japanese words in my verse. In my poetry, I have always sought to find connections, however deep down they may be, between the “Japanese” and the “Western”, and now I have added the ancient Japanese language to the mix. I have also sometimes incorporated an old Japanese poetic form, the waka—a short poem with 31 syllables, from which haiku developed—into my poems.
AMMD: An academic article you co-wrote with your sister Marie delineates the asymmetry of the Japanese art of ikebana and the symmetry of Western flower arrangement. I am curious if there are parallelisms to this contrast between asymmetry vs symmetry of flowers with the Japanese vs English languages.
MM: Marie, my sister, is the main author of that essay, but what we discussed in there is that in the Christian monotheistic world, there is a central point, and the world is built around it. The Japanese, on the other hand, have a very different mindset when it comes to spirituality. We embrace a polytheistic way of thinking.
In the arrangement of flowers in ikebana, the center is essentially a void, and the elements surrounding it create a dynamic symmetry that is in motion, generating and maintaining a balance. I believe that this structure of Japanese culture and spirituality can be applied to various arts or our modes of thinking. It also often happens when we speak. We tend to advance the discussion vaguely, detouring around the center, rather than clearly stating or pointing to the center of the issue. In The Tale of Genji, the protagonist Hikaru Genji serves as a kind of ‘empty center.’ He is a hero with a name that means ‘light.’ He is a source of radiance, whose luminosity illuminates the female characters surrounding him.
AMMD: The scholar Yukari Fukuchi Meldrum wrote in 2009 that although “the Japanese history of writing” began with translation, “the field of Translation Studies is not as established in Japan as it is in the West.” Fukuchi Meldrum further noted, “Books on translation theory are available, but most of the theories … are drawn from the works of Western theorists.” Is that still true today (fifteen years after the article has been written) or has the landscape of literary translation in Japan changed since then?
MM: Indeed, translated Western literature played an important role in forming modern Japanese literature, as the political system underwent drastic changes in the second half of the 19th century. The government was actively pursuing a process of Westernization, and European culture, customs, and manners flooded into the country.
Literature was no exception. Until then, ‘foreign literature’ in Japan had always been Chinese literature. The Japanese characters were based on Chinese characters, and we developed our own unique phonetic scripts. I think it is a Japanese tradition to adopt different cultural and literary essences from countries outside. We are very eager and flexible about it. And we have the talent to create something original by combining a Japanese sensibility with foreign inspirations. Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji contains some quotations that could be called “translations” from Chinese poetry. Japanese literature has a history and tradition of adapting non-Japanese literature. ‘Spiral translation’ is an extension of that tradition.
Another important and more recent change is that, while we used to turn our eyes mainly to the West, we have begun to pay attention to literature from Asia and Africa, especially Korean literature, thanks to the work of talented translators. Major literary magazines in Japan have recently been running special features on “World Literature.” Outdated notions of “the world” and “world literature” are being shaken up, and people are recapturing “the world” from a 21st century perspective.
AMMD: A Japanese-to-English translator, according to translators and translation scholars, would face syntagmatic issues on anaphora, sentence-length difference, premodifiers, multi-clause sentences, repetitions, and clause extent markers. In the case of English-to-Japanese translators like you, what linguistic issues usually arise?
MM: First and foremost, Japanese and Indo-European languages have totally different structures. In Japanese, subjects are often omitted. Verbs are placed at the end of sentences. In other words, the thinking process is reversed. We translate while inverting them. It is as if the brain keeps turning backward over and over as the words are being sent forward. Both Virginia Woolf and Arthur Waley wielded a modernist literary style called stream of consciousness, in which a single sentence tended to be very long. Sometimes a single sentence would even stretch into dozens of lines. To translate such a long, long sentence without losing the ‘flow’ of the original, while at the same time reversing the sentence, requires great care and a high level of linguistic ability.
Also, our language does not have the same accent and stress as English. Therefore, translators need to search for a completely different kind of rhythm from the original writing.
AMMD: When we speak of Literary Translation from and into the Japanese, who are your influences—Global Majority, Asian, and Japanese scholars, writers, and thinkers—whose works shaped your philosophy, your creative-critical writings, and your ethos? And in what ways have they been influential to you?
MM: I am deeply influenced by the psychologist Hayao Kawai, whom I mentioned earlier. He was a scholar who analyzed the Japanese psyche through Jungian psychology, and he was also an excellent writer. He wrote many significant books such as The Phenomenology of Shadows, The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan, The Structure of the Unconscious, and Jungian Psychology and Buddhism. His work on Murasaki Shikibu is titled The Tale of Genji and the Japanese: The Murasaki Mandala. He is also known for his conversations with writers such as Haruki Murakami, Shūsaku Endō, Yōko Ogawa, and poet Shuntarō Tanikawa. I believe they, too, have been inspired by Kawai.
Among writers, Shūsaku Endō, a Catholic novelist and critic, was a significant figure for me. Another one is Atsuko Suga, a nonfiction writer. I took her class during my master’s program and read Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia. She studied in Italy in the 1950s and stayed there. She, too, thought deeply about Japanese spirituality and Western culture. She also did pioneering work as a translator. She translated the works of Antonio Tabucchi and Natalia Ginzburg into Japanese, as well as the poetry of Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale. She is also known for translating the works of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kōbō Abe into Italian.
Last but not least, I would like to mention Sadakazu Fujii, a distinguished poet and scholar of The Tale of Genji and a classic language linguist. His in-depth knowledge of the classics has given me much insight. He has been one of the most understanding and supportive persons throughout our “spiral translation” project.
AMMD: Who are the translators that you are currently reading? Beyond Western Japanologists like Donald Keene, J Martin Holman, Ivan Morris, and Edward G Seidensticker, are there Japanese translators whose works from and into the Japanese you think the world is missing out on?
MM: There have been many, many translators of Japanese fiction since Keene and Seidensticker’s generation, but I particularly want to call your attention to contemporary translators working on Japanese poetry: Jeffrey Angles, Sawako Nakayasu, Andrew Campana, Kendall Heitzman, Eric Selland, Jordan A. Y. Smith, Takako Lento, Miho Nonaka, Kyoko Yoshida, and Rina Kikuchi and her colleagues in Australia.
Japanese poetry in translation also appears in venues such as Tokyo Poetry Journal, Monkey: New Writing from Japan, and small presses such as Vagabond Press in Australia.
I would also like to note that even today in the 21st century, in our country, the works of women writers tend to be sidelined. And there have been many who have not been able to find a place as creative writers and had to live as translators, which is considered a “minor” position. I could not list names right now, but I would like to give a lecture on the history of Japanese literature in the context of women writers and translators, starting with Murasaki Shikibu.
Megumi Moriyama, born in Tokyo, is a Japanese poet, critic, and translator. She is the author of four full-length books of poetry including Yume no tezawari (Tangible Dreams) and Midori no ryōbun (Green Zone) which was composed for performance and the stage. Selected as a rising poet by Gendaishi-techō magazine, her works appeared in Eureka, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and Gunzō. She won the 2020 Donald Keene Special Award, and served as a judge for translation prizes by the Japanese Literature Publishing Project of the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs, a guest at NHK World TV’s Haiku Masters and 100 Minutes of Great Books, and as resource speaker at an event organised by The Japan Foundation UK. She is known for her translation into the Japanese of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and a ‘back translation’ of Arthur Waley’s The Tale of Genji published by Sayusha. Apart from her forthcoming fifth poetry collection, her latest book includes Lady Murasaki’s Tea Party: The Tale of Genji in Spiral Translation. She has given lectures at a wide range of institutions in Japan and internationally, including Ritsumeikan University, Kokugakuin University, and the University of Iowa.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, The White Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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