Preface: Interpretation As A Form Of Translation

Introduction	

	In these days of little good faith we are inclined to see the tree, or rather many `individual' trees, but never the woods and their inclusion in a great forest of phenomena. Not with standing the fact that this world is still currently populated with a rich panorama of species we are informed by some fashionable thinkers that we fabricate in every thoughtful re-presentation a different specimen per person in accordance with the mood that attends each and every person in these creative micro-acts of edifying construction.
	Moreover, under attack from the relativists, a poem must now be interpreted as a muddled sea of words, albeit a refreshing surf wherein floats, in the interesting poem, a skillful choice of words, or, a fancy turn of phase, or, an original way of seeing the world, or, an idiosyncratic act of communication that in the final act of analysis must absolutely defy analysis. 
	But, on the other hand, let us not be too dogmatic in this counter-reaction! Of course a great poem is going to defy a definitive and dogmatic process of analysis as proposed, e.g., by some absolutist. But then it is my belief that a text will also defy with an equal force any attempt by a relativist to claim an act of absolute mis-reading or mis-interpretation. Moreover, an effort that is just as mis-placed is our focusing upon a search for a conceptual message as if what the poet wants to tell us is the poetic source, center and totality of that poetic text (if indeed their text has the semblance of aesthetic merit and an associated interest in informing its audience). 
	Any absolute search, or any absolute definition of a search or non-search, is seeking the chimera of a logical reading either for itself or for the imputed object of that activity. An absolute search that claims to be final, consistent and exactly what the artist intended (even to the extent of informing that artist, whether dead or alive, what exactly they may have intended in the first place) is correctly a mission without sense although, obviously, with the illusion of sense. On the other hand an absolute absense of a search and/or the object of a search is just as senseless, however much it may masquerade with the semblance of sense, however loudly shouted in speech or affirmed in writing, however repetitive such assurance may make for itself a home in the very illusion of this process never being carried to conclusion or completion, nor, being able to be so completely evacuated, destroyed, decomposed, deconstructed, etc! A project derives its sense from contrast! The complete absence of contrast generates no meaning and the illusion of a meaningful meaningfulness must be a residual trace left over from the nature of this naturally defective process (adopted in an attempt to establish) this absolute excess or absolute difference (in either the absolutist or the relativist mould along with their associated senses of eternalism and nihilism respectively)!
	However, be that as it may, these extremes need not stop us from encircling that aesthetic phenomenon, coming closer and, therein, centering ourselves within its experiential embrace. Allowing ourselves to `engage' in a `conversation' with its re-simulated `presence,' and, in this virtual region of intentionally defined time and space, permitting itself in the process to `engage us' in the reconstitution of the essential spirit that appears to move behind, or inform, that unique work; re-living along the way something of its sense of place in cultural history. In those works of merit we might even be able, given an adequate background reading, to intuit the historical nature of the originality as it was shown initially in the presentation of that work of art. This appearance of essential information being encapsulated in that text - a facet necessarily in all forms of production wherein, like some photographic hologram, we find textually self-reflected, and frozen in time, an essential snapshot of its cultural context embedded in this deposit? These intertextual roots in the harmonically structured work of art, however, more easily revealing this textual con-text, the world of that text. `Text' being read as any intentionally deposited deposition be it an activity or pattern of behaviour, a piece of art or craft, a written text or a musical score, etc., etc.
	Such engagement, as with the existential nature of all engagement, is in the form of a virtual relationship with that poem and, therein, the intentionality that originally informed and attempted to perfect its text in the first place. Such engagement presents itself as an `invitation' to interpret that text, an invitation that involves psychic acts of mutual `interrogation' and `appropriation.' In essence the reading of a text, whether poetic or non-poetic in complexion, involves an ongoing worked for dialectical act of understanding, or more correctly, the simulation of an act of understanding. Moreover, this simulation, in its re-simulational reconstitution, allows the text to effectively speak to us, albeit through the medium of a translation even if the language of that poem is in the native language of the reader or in a language that the reader is fluent in. 
	This is without a doubt a controversial point for those of little good faith who cannot accept the originality of the poetic text in its aesthetic integrity to re-manifest itself as an apparent phenomenon in its own right. That accepted, we thus find, or rather re-discover, the authenticity that underwrites the whole industry that surrounds poetic texts concerned with interpretation, criticism and translation into other languages. Of course it stands to reason that a translation into another language must remove us from the linguistic beauty of the language, if present, in the original text. However, I must hasten to add, although much of the superficial beauty of that text must be lost in such a process of re-appropriation and translation the power of the text of high aesthetic merit, regardless of whether it is a poem or a novel or whatsoever, in the hands of a sensitive and skillful translator must through the humanity of its intentionality, also slip through and re-empower its re-expression with or without the formal and material devices originally exercised in its original declaration as witnessed in its historical exhibition. Without hesitation I would say that the successful translator is also an artist, and a poet, and that the fruits of their collaboration may well, in their own right, equal or even exceed the merit of the original poem. If we can accept this latter claim of `potential excess in translation' then we are forced to accept the point that the act of translation is possible and that a poem can transcend the cultural confinement of its own textual and historical emplacement! That through such transcendence the understanding of a poem can be shifted from one person to another, and, moved in writing from one language to another; transcending in the process a cognitive treatment of time and space, causation and ego. (292)

			Recognizing friends;
			meeting the artist in thought
			over the cent'uries.

	But in the background I know I hear a persistent chorus of opinion that interminably chants an argument to the effect that the beautiful language of the poem will be lost in translation. What linguistic materialism! Surely a poem is greater than the mere sum of its language? Is it not true that every word in a living language is done to death on a daily basis? Every word is a hackneyed, hacked to death piece of convention that is on the same footing as the rest of the inventory mustered, and drilled, in the formation of some particular poetic text, or any other text for that matter. Any fine sonneteer worth their salt, worthy of their trade, should be able to tell you this fact! How often a fine word, an original expression must in the end-product be sacrificed in order to give a unity of flavour to that overall aesthetic text? Even sometimes the inspired first line is decapitated from that body, a body of text that demands its instant removal forthwith in order to preserve and promote its own phenomenal integrity rather than fracture this integrity through the re-supporting the apparent integrity of a fancy word or a strange phrase or an original twist of irrelevant meaning. But I digress, although, without doubt, a poem constructed along such an avenue of fashion presents a dangerous distraction, as a continual act of digression, to those lesser souls who chase the same in the manufacture of a presentable text. In essence a poem resides between its words just as the musicality of a score lies between its concatenation of notes.
	Of course we must also argue, and resist the temptation, to construe a poem as completely divorced from its dependence on language; merely the crystallization of an idea transparently radiating its presence through the text of that poem what ever language or languages it has been cast in. The glow of language must not mesmerize us to the fact that although a poem is dependent upon language it also overwrites and transcends the otherwise stale currency of its vocabulary. On this aspect of our debate let us charter a middle course lest we reef ourselves on the shallows that inhabit either shore!
	To argue this complex position `that a poem can be successfully translated' and complete this preface let me now discuss the following terms and expressions: the poem as a unique phenomenon in its own right, originality, simulation, engagement, interrogation, appropriation, interpretation and translation. Then, to conclude, let me briefly sketch the relevance these concepts have for an understanding of this particular volume of poetry.

Explication 

	How can a text be a phenomenon in its own right? For a start this expression in its own right is not equivalent to the thing itself in itself, but is coincident with the simulation of the thing itself as it appears in a process of continual re-engagement and thematizational refinement.
	Let me say that this question is examined in the essay following this Preface under the concept of provocation, e.g. Suffice to say that under the veneer of language, re-created by the means of language, a good poem has a good back-bone, or structure, that in our experience of the illusion of its `hollow core' is, in effect, essentially invariant in its embraced engagement. That although a poem may need to be treated to metaphorical circumspection our journey around that poem need not be complete, if that were at all possible, by virtue of the fact that an essential intuition into a few perspectives relevant to the appreciation of that artwork is all that is necessary to initially entertain that text (in its transcendental depth). Our powers of transcendental appreciation and detachment also allowing us to simultaneously enter the re-simulation of that text, and, also stand back from its creative illusion as presented and re-presented in its construction, or re-construction. This necessary aspect of our being able to stand back from the re-created presence of that poem also allowing us to translate that text into language appropriated by us for our own reading of that text and in this process of interpretive translation move closer to a cognitive appreciation of that text in terms more or less of its own provocational making. To this extent the poetic text of merit realizes in the virtual space of our interaction with it the apparent sense of it being a distinctive inter-dependent phenomenon in its own right despite the fact that that text as a cultural deposition is also, in absolute terms of reference, indivisible from its cultural matrices of origination and projection; speaker and hearer, or audience. Moreover, each and every act of textuality lives in a silent relationship with all the rest of this con-textual world, collectively acting as the pre-textual ground for the manifestation of textual phenomena. Therefore, phenomenal distinctiveness must not be forced into a mould of absolute difference. At the same time this lack of independent textual `substantiality' must also not be used to dismiss this `appearance' of textual phenomena. 
	Hence the poem must be treated as a phenomenon with its own distinct boundaries in the midst of the cultural world that saw its creation and, I must also add, its re-creation. That not only can our appreciation of a text be centered in the intentional being of that text but also our relevant understanding of the cultural matrix that saw its construction can also be centered in our ongoing thematization and appreciation. Although our virtual recreation of another culture can be allowed to rectify itself in keeping with the spirit of that which it essentially simulates that simulation will never the less be conducted through the perspective, or lens, of our own native environment. But don't let us for one moment feel that a culture cannot be eventually appreciated, either from within its midst or from without, in an adequate and essential manner. The greatest artistic outpourings of a culture are condensations and crystallizations of this ability to focus on these essential reflections. In this regard, e.g., I find myself taking an unending delight in specimens of Chinese Sung Dynasty ceramic artistry at its very best, perceiving such items as material concentrations of this culture that can still speak to us today even though the cultural horizon that surrounded those `texts' is no longer maintained in the same overall configuration as that to be found fossilized in such presentations.
	Now let me discuss that curse placed upon the modern world of art that exhibits itself in that particular anxiety that promotes `that desperate desire for originality;' an ambition mistakenly interpreted as an avoidance of the past, an aversion to cliches never to be repeated except to poke fun at, or, to seriously deconstruct and mock their cultural preservation. The heritage of the past is either to be rejected or to be cannibalized at some cultural picnic that achieves the same nihilistic end. As a result we find a sterility of form found all too commonly today, an excuse badly crafted, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, without resolve, without the breath of inspiration, aspiring to no particular aesthetic sense of resolution; a flat, pointless exercise of egoistical wastefulness or downright destructiveness. A frozen immobility of the spirit finding only a resonance in the world of the lost...
	Poetic originality is not found in the choice of a fine word but in the recreation of a sense of place for that word within the frame of that text. A sense of being at home that correctly transcends the confinement of language, a state of mind induced through the overwriting of language not the mere material presence of language! Poetry is a transcendence of logical confinement. A wonderful wine poured into a bottle that, however attractive and distracting as a container, must be opened in order to allow us to sample the bouquet of such a promise of potential richness. This `appropriation' is in effect a translation of that text, a process of interpretation that allows each person to appreciate that text for themselves to the extent they can currently come to an appreciation in the form of a `personalized reconstruction of that text' through meeting the material presentation and entering into a reading of that textual phenomenon.
	Originality of a text is achieved, or not achieved, through the dialectical structure of that text. To begin with the text must distinctively and successfully manipulate evocational structures, those relatively non-controversial intersubjective packages essential to the basic human repertoire, which, through the medium of language set out to re-present novel juxtapositions of everdayness among such elements, present a novel perspective upon the same and achieve in the process a harmony and richness of purpose that cannot be merely encased in the text as text qua text. The text must have a sense of resolution, find an element of resolve; express a desire to find and exercise an intentional directedness, a sense of resolution through a harmonic unfolding of that text wherein processes of mediation discharge the dissonance of that text through some form of textual-contextual accommodation. A process of judgment, I must add, that to be appropriate to this task to hand must not entertain this desire to be original lest it divert the spontaneity of its response to this now contrived and derivative search for mere novelty. In the great work of art we find the integrity of the artwork, the artist and the ideal integrity of their cultural world! An integrity that manufactures an outpouring of spiritual being, an excess upwelling from the hollow core at the psychic center of the person, an activity selflessly stamped upon the presentation of their artwork as a work-of-art-in-their-world-of-art. Originality is, therefore, never aimed for, but, an indefinable something arrived at and recognized in the simulation, and re-simulation, that presents, or re-presents, that phenomenon.
	The words simulation, and re-simulation, are chosen because the work of art presents a transcendental illusion. A painted landscape is constructively recreated by the skillful artist. However go too close to the surface of the painting and the illusion will disappear. (285)

			A wonderful scroll,
			on closer inspection find
			the scene disappeared.

	Moreover, the continued presence of this illusion in experience, upon the establishment of the right degree of transcendental distance, necessitates an ongoing re-simulation of that simulation. As well, the act of creation is productive of something out of nothing, hence this concept of non-substantial intentional simulation. (286)

			The creative soul
			feinting the great illusion;
			something from nothing.

	In this respect, like a piece of theatre, the poem is no different. Immersed within its sense of presence we find our simultaneous transcendence from the same through our powers of reflection that let us stand back from that work of art, a state of affairs provocatively empowered by the dialectical richness of that text, breathing a sense of life or force into the unfolding of its aesthetic display. A series of textual images or ideas parade before us, a drama that on one hand fools us into seeing life where there is none, and, on the other hand, our simultaneously coming to see no life where there is the simulation of the same.
	Such simulation, and its re-simulation, seduces us to seek an enjoyment in our ongoing engagement with that text. Such involvement engages us in an act of mutual `interrogation.' The text is questioned in the auspices of a transcendental suspension. Indeed the properly constructed and exercised question is a transcendental suspension, in essence a suspension of all forms of judgmental value. What could be less mysterious is also perhaps that which cannot escape a sense of mystery, a sense of the numinous, etc. We try to question that text and that text questions us! We try to unravel the meaning and import of a text and that text attempts to deconstruct us! Then in the balance of these to-ings and fro-ings the power of the text takes us in hand and delivers us spontaneously into the endeepening midst of a simulation of its own intentional depths. The balanced non-literal treatment of metaphor acts in exactly the same manner. The same balance being necessary between consonant con-text and dissonant text before the intuitive feeling of resolution manifests its re-simulated sense of presence through a complex form of provoked accommodational directedness. This experience of resolution establishing our relationship with that text, and, our virtual relationship with its author or authors and the nature of their world. (293)

			How heretical
			shines the thinker's art  burning
			in the main library.

	As a consequence the artwork appropriates us as a necessary onlooker `in' a work of art. To make it our own, to discern a recognition that we are coming to an understanding of that text, we must appropriate the artwork in our own fashion. In essence we must understand this textual phenomenon through the center of our own being in such a manner that allows us to circumscribe that work of art and therein merge its center with our own. In this state of reciprocal balance, another aspect of the transcendental suspension, the provocative power of the artwork is unleashed, made a living translation for us in the form of an interpretation that both reveals and conceals the integrated fragments that constitute the extent of its discourse. The `authenticity' of this conversation establishing itself in the phenomenal presentation of that relationship through an act of engaged involvement, a process that sees out a degree of ongoing rectification that re-realizes the distinct and unique nature of that work of art as an apparent textual phenomenon in its own right. Any introduced inauthenticity imparted to that relationship, either by its re-creating audience or its creating fabricator, disestablishing the apparent selfless self-presentation of that otherwise authentic possibility for revealed-concealment.
	Different people at different times will see different things in an artwork yet in these various translations the provocative power of a work of art of merit will ensure some degree of commonality in interpretation! In effect a poem is translated even if it is read in its own language. That this presence of translation establishes an interpretation of that text which in the process re-simulates the re-presentation of that phenomenon. An understanding that is centered to some degree or other in the experiential establishment of this sense of the transcendental; an activity centered, entered, exercised  and exited via the transcendental suspension. That only a transcendental appreciation of the poetic text will reveal the hollow, non-substantial, immaterial center of its own phenomenal being. To translate a poem into another natural language is to merely continue this process of interpretation and in the process appropriate a new language and a new set of choice expressions that resonate in keeping with the phenomenal meaning-structures and functions embedded in the initial text of that poem. In such a transition formal and material devices found present in the initial format need not re-appear in the re-simulation of that textual phenomenon. What is preserved is an intimation of sense, the aura of connotation and the provocative structures that integrate overt/covert forms of concealment and disconcealment emblazoned in the fabric of that text realized through the interrogation of transcendental engagement. To facilitate this process of re-appropriation the translator may need to use other devices such as notes, footnotes, monographs, introductions, descriptions of relevant cultural considerations, forms of explication and critique, etc. 
	Are we to deny this serious business of translation in all its forms of manifestation or merely limit its application to the province of non-poetic texts? Does a poem have a privileged position in this regard that denies the translator any hope for the slightest trace of success? Can we explicate our prejudice on this subject? Without doubt a poem has a sense of compression that makes this task the more difficult but for the reasons elicited in this essay I believe this task not to be an impossible one. The more meaningful a poem, the greater its merit, the easier this task must be to translate, but, I must add, the more difficult therefore must it be for the translator to approach, equal and surpass the inspired beauty of that original text! Can we not hope, and be grateful, that this task be attempted and discharged in as skillful a manner as it might be thought possible in keeping with the essential spirit of that original text and in the process allowing a wider circle of people to enjoy the artistry of all concerned? So I challenge the reader to take a middle path in this controversy and argue for neither the dogmatic absolutist's vision of `transparency' nor the groping, destructive, relativist's blind clinging to their version of the `opaque.' (289)

			Ev'erything we do
			is like a great work of art,
			for public viewing.

Conclusion

	This small volume of poems, all four hundred haiku when we include the Supplement, begs to be interpreted, indeed, cries out to be translated! These small texts deserve, with an intensity of need; albeit of a widely varying degree, to be treated kindly and accepted as distinct, but not discrete, phenomenon in their own right. Quietly asking us to observe the degree of originality that may, or may not, be present, and, in the process setting up before us their immaterial inter-textuality and intro-textuality. The exercise of these two interdependent mutually contrasting directions helping us to recognize the immaterial and relational nature of a text's aesthetic expression. That a textual simulation becomes, in being re-viewed, a re-simulation of that now `translated' textual state of affairs. Moreover, these micro-textual reflections of the life-world; that world of life pre-textual to all textual outpouring, seek our engagement with the hint of a hopeful promise that these aesthetic texts have more to offer in return than the care and attention given to them on our part. Patient vehicles of mutual interrogation silently demanding in the process to be appropriated, translated into one's own language of comprehension and open to the possibility of being seriously translated into another natural non-artificial language. (291)

			Distilling moments
			already past, could spirits
			be preserved alive?

	That it is necessary to also deconstruct these texts in order to arrive at an appreciation delivered through engagement, appropriation, translation, re-simulation and an auto-critical unfolding of a hard worked for, but rewarded, authenticity of interpretation. That the text can be handled in this way through an encircling, entering and centering of that simulated phenomenon; a process focused through the lens of our own centered and transcendentally suspended sense of self; allowing the text to reconstitute its own re-thematization through a re-simulation of that intentionally informed state of affairs. Here we have a virtual giving up of the text through suspension whose informed spontaneity then restores the text before us in the midst of its own apparent re-creation. Hence the recreation of art and its creation of value from the relatively value-less, a dialectical generation of value around an absence of being. (286)

			The greatest treasure;
			a painting of great merit,
			entirely worthless.

	However, this implicit petition of requests should never be the direct object of our aesthetically interested-disinterest. Rather, our attention should seek to recover the existential sense of an intuition that recognizes the `spontaneous' delivery of our transcendentally suspended appreciation without the direct intervention of calculative thought, and, that this process must seriously witness our equally non-serious approach to these targets of our desired comprehension. In essence we must also humorously treat the text of these haiku as if they were shadows of shadows, like images of images unseen, as but `traces' like a trail of footprints upon the sand, as bubbles on the stream of life, an echo echoing, or, as like droppings underfoot needing to be swept away. (280)

			Seeping out haiku
			like droppings rolling out from
			this used antique pen.