michael lambe

I want to get a couple of links out of the way first so…

There aren’t enough posts on bars on Deep Kyoto. This summer I aims to remedy that. God help my liver! Anyway, the first of many is up tonight: Bar Hawkwind. It’s a good place. I like it.

And this will make you smile if you haven’t seen it already: Where the hell is Matt?

Now on to tonight’s topic. The last meditation from Hozouji, if you remember went like this: すべてが割りけれぬところに人生の妙味がある
Which I somewhat lazily translated as: Not everything can be broken down into simple solutions, and therein lies life’s beauty.

Well, Masaya was good enough to write to me with some thoughts on it and here they are:

There are two tricky parts in the original, which are difficult to translate.

The first is 割り切れぬ（割り切れない, the opposite of 割り切れる）.

Maybe you know, but it’s originally a mathematical term.

If you divide 10 by 2, you get 5. That’s 割り切れる.

If you divide 10 by 3, you get 3.333333333333333333(and 3 continues forever). That’s 割り切れない（= 割り切れぬ）.

We use this idea metaphorically for something that you have to decide, you have to make choice, or even how you feel about.

For example, if someone ask you whether you like your job, and your answer is either ” Absolutely” or “Absolutely not”, then that’s 割り切れる.

If your answer is “Yes and no. I like it because such and such, but I don’t like it because such and such, but then …, even so …. but on the other hand … (arguments for and against continues on and on like the never ending decimal places)”, that’s 割り切れない.

It is also used to describe feelings. When you decide something or accept something, and you feel that something is not quite right about it, that feeling can be described as 割り切れない.

割り切れない indicates there is no simple solution, it’s not easy to find a simple answer.

In your translation, you use “simple solutions” to capture the idea, which is very good.

The next one is 妙味. This is an interesting word. It’s a combining 妙(strange) and 味(taste). “Strange taste” in 妙味 has a positive meaning. It’s strange, unusual, not boring, not common, so it’s interesting. Life is interesting because not every thing has a simple solution, and you have to find answers to many things. And even when you think you’ve found an answer, you have an uncomfortable feeling of unsettledness（割り切れない）.

I like this poem. Thanks.

Thank you, Masaya! Now the thing is, when I first translated this poem there was something, an uncomfortable feeling of unsettledness in fact about my translation that bugged me. That strong sense of life being “interesting” in 妙味 was completely lost in my translation because I stuck too closely to the dictionary definition of beauty. This despite the still small voice at the back of my mind telling me that something was amiss. Of course I could have gone with charm as my friend Osamu suggested, but that word didn’t seem to carry enough weight (not in it’s light and fluffy modern meaning anyway). So Masaya’s commentary got me thinking again and I think I finally hit on the right word:

Not everything
can be broken down
into simple solutions,
and therein lies
life’s fascination.

Seems kind of obvious now… Lesson learned: trust your instincts, not the dictionary!

I shall be posting a fresh meditation very soon.