Translator’s note
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH AND CHRONOLOGY
This volume represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of Daisaku Ikeda’s poetry in translation to date. Earlier publications, such as translations by Watson,1 Epp2 and Gebert,3 offered more limited selections of his work, focused on particular periods, such as his earlier works, or on a specific theme, such as his thoughts on war and peace.
In contrast, this volume includes poems covering a span of more than sixty years: 1945 to 2007. As such, it contains works written in a wide range of styles, voices and modes. In selecting the poems for inclusion in this volume, an effort was made to ensure that this sample would be as representative as possible in terms of period, style and, in the case of the many poems addressed to specific individuals or groups, the nature of the recipient.
Part of Ikeda’s view of literature is that there is an indissoluble relationship between the author and the work; that the words provide an important window on the inner life of the writer. In light of this, it is probably appropriate to offer a cursory biographical portrait of the author, relating this to a chronology of poetic production.
Daisaku Ikeda was born in Tokyo in 1928. His family had been engaged in cultivating and harvesting nori (edible seaweed) in Tokyo Bay for generations. The family had enjoyed relative prosperity until a massive earthquake struck the Tokyo region in 1923, producing widespread devastation and shifting the seabed of Tokyo Bay, thus greatly reducing the nori harvest. Soon after Ikeda was born, his father became bedridden with rheumatism, plunging the family deeper into poverty. Ikeda himself had a weak constitution and, as a result, from early in life he gravitated toward reading and literature as opposed to more strenuous physical activity. He has written that his early ambitions included becoming a writer of fiction or a reporter for a newspaper or magazine.4
The first poem in this collection, “Blossoms that scatter,” was written in April 1945, when Ikeda was seventeen. It was written in the wake of the firebombings that had leveled much of Tokyo just months before the end of World War II. The war had had a devastating impact on Ikeda’s family— his four older brothers had been drafted and sent to the Asian front; of them, his eldest brother was killed in action in Burma, although the family would not be informed of this for several years.
In August 1947, Ikeda encountered Josei Toda (1900–58), who was then engaged in rebuilding the lay Buddhist movement, the Soka Gakkai, that he and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944) had founded in 1930. Their Buddhist beliefs led Makiguchi, the organization’s first president, and Toda to criticize the wartime policies of the Japanese militarist government and, as a result, they were arrested in July 1943 as “thought criminals.” In November 1944, Makiguchi died of malnutrition while still imprisoned. Toda managed to survive the ordeal and was released in July 1945, just prior to the Japanese surrender. This encounter with Toda proved decisive for Ikeda, as he came to regard the older man as his personal mentor, and it was through Toda that Ikeda took faith in Nichiren Buddhism and became active in the Soka Gakkai. “Fuji and the poet” and “Morigasaki Beach” were both written in 1947 and capture the thoughts of the nineteen-year-old author. A much later poem, “My mentor, Josei Toda” (1986), offers a portrait of this crucial relationship.
Throughout the 1950s, Ikeda dedicated himself to supporting Toda’s work as he developed the Soka Gakkai into the largest and most dynamic Buddhist movement in postwar Japan. Such poems as “Offering prayers at Mount Fuji” (1950) and “Travelers” (1952) were written during this period.
Toda died on April 2, 1958. In May 1960, Ikeda succeeded Toda to become the third president of the Soka Gakkai. He continued to lead efforts to expand the movement, which grew from a membership of some 750,000 households at the time of Toda’s death to more 8 million households in 1970.
This involved a demanding schedule of travel, both within and, increasingly, outside Japan, as Ikeda traveled to offer encouragement to nascent Soka Gakkai memberships in Europe, the Americas and Asia. Ikeda’s prose efforts during this period were dedicated to providing contemporary exegesis and interpretation of the writings of Nichiren (1222–82), the founder of the school of Buddhism practiced by the members of the Soka Gakkai. In 1968, he began a multivolume novelization of the history of the organization under the leadership of Josei Toda titled The Human Revolution. “Daybreak” (1966) is one of a handful of poems published during the decade of the 1960s.
Also under Ikeda’s leadership, the scope of the movement’s activities expanded beyond the purely religious, to include engagement in the fields of peace, culture and education. To this end, Ikeda founded a number of institutions, including a research institution (1962), a concert association (1963), a political party (1964), junior and senior high schools (1968), a four-year university (1971) and an art museum (1973). These multifaceted endeavors were inspired by the Soka Gakkai’s long-standing interpretation of Nichiren’s writings and life as a paradigm of bringing the tenets of Buddhism to bear on the real-life challenges of living in society.
Starting in the early 1970s, it became increasingly common for Ikeda to use poetry as a medium for expressing his understanding of Buddhist concepts and for encouraging people encountered in the course of fulfilling his responsibilities. The collection “To my young friends” (1970–71) comprised short poems written to various individuals, often commemorating an encounter or exchange. Likewise, the poems “The people,” “Weeds” and “Mother” (1971) were dedicated, respectively, to the youth and women memberships of the Soka Gakkai.
Long-simmering tensions with the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood, with whom the Soka Gakkai was associated, came to a head in the late 1970s over the respective roles of ordained and lay practitioners, with the priesthood asserting its inherent superiority over the laity. For several years Ikeda was compelled to maintain a low profile within the organization and its activities. In the early 1980s, he again chose the medium of poetry to publicly reaffirm his mentoring bonds with the youth membership of the organization. As had been the case with “Mother” and “The people,” lyrics based on “Song of the crimson dawn” and “Youth, scale the mountain of kosen-rufu of the twenty-first century” (1981) were set to music and gained enduring popularity among the Soka Gakkai membership.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Ikeda’s travels increasingly took on the aspect of a kind of citizen diplomacy. During 1974 and 1975, for example, he met with the respective leaders of China (Zhou Enlai), the Soviet Union (Alexei Kosygin) and the United States (Henry Kissinger) in an effort to reduce Cold War tensions. These efforts accelerated during the 1980s and often involved the use of poetry, translated into the recipient’s language, as a vehicle for a highly personalized style of diplomacy. Poems written to such public figures as Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi (1987) might commemorate an earlier encounter or, as in the case of South African President Nelson Mandela (1990) or Philippine President Corazón Aquino (1991), serve as a form of greeting and recognition, presented at the time of their first meeting. A similar pattern pertains for poems written for such cultural figures as the Russian theatrical producer Nataliya Sats (1990) and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin (1992).
The Soka Gakkai International (SGI) was established in 1975, with Ikeda as president, to coordinate among a growing number of Soka Gakkai organizations around the world. Ikeda’s travels increasingly included meetings with SGI members and organizations in different countries, and his encouragement was often expressed in the form of poetry. This can be seen in the poems offered to the SGI memberships in Italy (1987), Malaysia (1988), Germany (1991) and the United States (1987, 1993).
The conflict with the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood resurfaced in the early 1990s, taking the form of a decisive split when, on November 28, 1991, and despite Ikeda’s repeated calls for dialogue, the high priest of the sect excommunicated more than twelve million Soka Gakkai International members worldwide, an event now celebrated by the SGI as the Day of Spiritual Independence. Ikeda reflects on this conflict in “The noble voyage of life” (1999). Other poems such as “The path to a peaceful world, a garden for humankind” (2000) and “Eternally radiant champion of humanity” (2001) express harsh critiques at those forces of authority, both religious and secular, which Ikeda sees as being indifferent or detrimental to the happiness of the common person.
During the 1990s, Ikeda sought to give enduring institutional form to the SGI’s commitment to peace and human flourishing by founding a number of international policy and research institutions. Both the founding and second presidents of the Soka Gakkai had been educators, and although Ikeda never had the opportunity to meet Makiguchi, he had learned of the latter’s vision of humanistic education through his own mentor, Josei Toda. In the early 1950s, Toda and Ikeda had discussed the idea of founding a university that would embody these ideals; the founding of Soka University in Japan in 1971 was now followed by the establishment of Soka University of America in 2001. “Standing among the ruins of Takiyama Castle” (2000) gives expression to Ikeda’s sentiments for the students and graduates of these educational institutes and the educational enterprise more broadly.
Ikeda’s poetic output has continued to be prolific in recent years, with more than 200 long-form poems penned in just the years between 2000 and 2006. Through his poetry, he continues to address not only specific groups or individuals, but also larger themes such as peace (“August 15—The dawn of a new day” (2001), “The promise of a majestic peace” (2003)) and the mission of poetry and poets (“The poet—warrior of the spirit” (1998), “Together holding aloft laurels of the people’s poetry” (2000) and “Salute to poets” (2007)); as well as to write poems that might be described as humanist reflections on nature (“Pampas grass, the poet’s friend” and “In praise of morning glories” (2007)).
ABOUT THE TRANSLATIONS
This volume comprises renderings into English by three different translators: Burton Watson, Robert Epp and a team of Soka Gakkai-associated translators. The reader will quickly notice three quite different styles of translation. This is in part an inevitable outcome of translating between languages as grammatically distant and historically unrelated as Japanese and English, something which inevitably involves a considerable degree of interpretative intervention on the part of the translator. But at the same time it is also a testament to the rich multivalence of Ikeda’s poetic language, the range of voices and registers in which he writes.
Translations and translators are always guided by an implicit understanding of the function and nature of human language; the possibilities and problems of facilitating the movement of linguistic, intellectual and affective content between different languages and cultures; and the scope of the translator’s respective responsibilities to the author and the reader. Professors Watson and Epp are well-known translators who have written about these issues generally as well as how they apply specifically to the translation of Ikeda’s work.5 The comments here will thus be limited to the poems for which the Soka Gakkai translation team was responsible.
The ideal that has been pursued here has been to create a text that is not passively subordinate to the original, but which has the maximum possibility of finding a meaningful place in the lives of English readers. To this end, we have sought to reproduce, to the degree possible, the native reader’s experience of these poems.
To do this is of course to add an additional subjective ambition to the already subjective undertaking of translation. This is further complicated by the nature of poetry, which seeks to express things that lie behind, between and around words, not simply what is contained stably within them.
The setting of such a goal, however, was felt to be necessary if these translations were to fulfill even minimally the ethical obligations due to author and reader. Both modern and classical Japanese (a grammar Ikeda has often employed) leave a great deal unstated: the language regularly makes no singular/plural distinction; there are technically no tenses, only grammatical features to indicate whether an action is considered completed or ongoing; the subjects of sentences are often only implied. The reader is expected to supply these elements, to see or feel a scene evoked by very sparse descriptors. A translation that refrained from providing any of the elements brought to the original by a native reader would remain obscure to the point of incomprehensibility.
Since poetry is not simply a matter of what is said, but how it is said, these translations also seek to reproduce the rhythms and timbres of Ikeda’s poetic voice. As noted, he at times adopts a distinctly and self-consciously literary style, using the classical grammar that permits the kinds of compression typically associated with such Japanese poetic forms as haiku and waka. (The 1987 poem dedicated to the novelist Eiji Yoshikawa, for example, is written in this style.) At other times he adopts a simple vernacular voice. But his language maintains a certain stately rhythm, perhaps reflective of his sense of the dignity of ordinary language and experience.
A final aspect of Ikeda’s poetry that should be touched on is what might be termed its addressive nature. As noted, many of the poems are dedicated or addressed to particular individuals, groups or even whole societies. This is in part the inevitable outgrowth of his responsibility, as the leader of a religious movement, to offer guidance and encouragement to those who seek it from him. But it may also be understood as reflective of his Buddhist appreciation that the universal is contained within the particular, and that larger messages are most effectively conveyed when addressed to a specific audience.
Linguistically, this is facilitated by the relational nature of Japanese, the many expressions for “I” and “you” which can indicate various degrees of human relatedness, from rigid formality to warm intimacy. Ikeda typically addresses his reader with intimacy, using terms that indicate bonds of trust and affection. He even at times writes in the first person on behalf of his addressee as an expression of solidarity and shared purpose. This could also reflect the Buddhist worldview in which “self” and “other” are not irreconcilable opposites, but necessary and complementary parts of a larger whole. Needless to say, the relative poverty of English in this regard, where we have only “you” and “I,” complicates the work of attempting to express the textured sense of relationship that is central to the reader’s experience in Japanese.
All these factors have, it is felt, necessitated a less restrained “reading into” (or “out of”) the original if there was to be any hope of enabling the English reader to see what Japanese readers see, to feel and hear what is felt and heard in the original.
While Ikeda’s language may at times be complex or even obscure, it is clear that he does not wish to simply leave his reader with literary puzzles for private contemplation. His desire is to have an impact on his addressee/reader. In many cases he clearly seeks to elicit quite specific emotional valences, such as pity or outrage, or to inspire some form of action.
This freer style of translation would seem to accord with Ikeda’s own preferences. Considering Ikeda’s long history as an avid reader of literature and poetry in translation, it is evident that he has not valued the literal or word-for-word transposition of the original so much as the generation of a new, parallel text in the target language—one capable of provoking the mood and sentiment of the original and, ideally, facilitating a sense of encounter between author and reader.
For Ikeda, the fourth- and fifth-century translations of Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit into Chinese by Kumarajiva (344–413), in particular his translation of the Lotus Sutra, realize the highest possibilities of translation. The enduring popularity and influence of this translation, revered for centuries throughout East Asia, is testament to its success in conveying that most intransmissible of moods—enlightenment—and in facilitating that rarest of encounters—with the Buddha, in particular the Buddha residing within each of us (for that is the Lotus Sutra’s central message).
Also following the historic example of Buddhist translation, every effort has been made to render specialized Buddhist terminology into language that will be accessible to the uninitiated reader. There are a few exceptions, which are noted in the glossary at the end of this volume. Perhaps the most important term which has been left in Japanese is kosen-rufu, a term originally from the Lotus Sutra that can be translated as “to proclaim and spread widely” and which indicates the propagation of Buddhist teachings. Within the Soka Gakkai, the sense of this term has been extended to indicate the process of working for the realization of a peaceful society through the promotion of such core Buddhist values as respect for the sanctity of life.
Readers’ reactions to texts are subjective and vary widely, but they are not random. The process of developing these translations has benefited from the feedback and guidance of a number of sensitive native readers of Japanese, as well as extended editorial exchanges in English. This dialogic process recapitulates the methods employed by Kumarajiva, about which Ikeda has written eloquently.6 Through dialogue, different perspectives are revealed and become available to the participants in the exchange; in the work of translation, dialogue enables participants on all sides of a linguistic divide to deepen and broaden their awareness of the reactions elicited by particular words, expressions and turns of phrase, as well as to the poems as a whole. It expands the realm of possible expressions within the target language while anchoring it in a more certain and accurate reading of the original.
The desire that readers of these translations will experience them as an encounter, and that this, the product of dialogue, will mark the start of a further dialogue, is one the translators feel confident is shared by the author.
These translations are based on the texts contained in the Japanese complete works of Daisaku Ikeda (Ikeda Daisaku zenshu). In cases in which a poem was presented by Ikeda to a public figure, the English translation used at that time has been treated as the definitive text. Names of contemporary Japanese individuals are given in the English order of personal followed by family name. For historical figures, the traditional Japanese name order (family name first) is used. Finally, diacritical marks that indicate differences in pronunciation that would not be meaningful to the average reader of English are not used in this volume.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These translations would not have been possible without the collaboration and support of a large number of individuals. At times we have worked from excellent earlier translations, shaping them to fit the tone adopted for this volume. As mentioned, the interpretation of the original and the choice of English expression have been developed through numerous dialogues and exchanges. The number of people to whom thanks are due is so great, the timeframe over which the translations evolved so long, and the risk of inadvertent omission so onerous, that I must confine myself to a general, but heartfelt, expression of appreciation.
Andrew Gebert
on behalf of the translation team
March 2014
1. Daisaku Ikeda, Songs from My Heart, trans. Burton Watson (New York, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1978).
2. Daisaku Ikeda, The People, trans. Robert Epp (Santa Monica: World Tribune Press, 1972); Daisaku Ikeda, Hopes and Dreams, trans. Robert Epp (Santa Monica: World Tribune Press, 1976).
3. Daisaku Ikeda, Fighting for Peace, trans. Andrew Gebert (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 2004).
4. Daisaku Ikeda, My Recollections, trans. Robert Epp (Santa Monica: World Tribune Press, 1980), p. 19.
5. Burton Watson, “Translator’s Note” in Ikeda, Songs from My Heart, p. 9; Robert Epp, “Translator’s Note” in Ikeda, Hopes and Dreams, pp. 7–10.
6. Daisaku Ikeda, “Kumaraju o kataru” (Discussion on Kumarajiva), in Toyo Gakujutsu Kenkyu, vol. 22(1), pp. 89–113 (1983).