Discoveries

It’s easy to see why Goethe’s first novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” written in 1774 when he was 25, has remained a cult classic for generations of readers. Werther is a young man, an artist with what translator Burton Pike calls in his introduction an “excess of feeling.” He is passionate about everything from well water to peasants and nearly swoons in the face of nature -- hills, vistas and valleys send him quite over the edge. Werther is poised at that moment in life when the world of men, civilization and society threaten his sensitive soul. Bad taste, stupidity and arrogance send him running for cover. His mother wants him to pursue a life in the royal court, a stable career, apprenticed to an ambassador. Werther retreats to the countryside to paint and think on his future. There this child man is surrounded by children who love him and play with him as though he were one of them. Such sensitive souls may be ridiculed as “hothouse flowers,” but young Werther seems lovable and admirable.

When he falls in love with the beautiful Lotte, it is forever. But she is engaged to another, a perfectly fine (bit of a paper pusher but decent nonetheless) man. We root for Werther as he speeds toward suicide. It becomes a kind of chant, a story told and retold, its words increasingly familiar: “What is the world to our heart without love? What a magic lantern is without light!” he writes to his friend Wilhelm. “0 you reasonable people!” he tells Albert (Lotte’s fiance). “Passion! Drunkenness! Madness! You stand there so calmly, so uninvolved, you moral people! I have been drunk more than once, my passions were never far from madness, and I don’t regret either.” Of the ambassador, he says, “He is a bitter enemy of all the inversions of word order that slip through my pen. If one does not plane down one’s sentences according to the traditional rhythm, he doesn’t understand a word of them. It’s torture having to deal with such a person.” You can see how a new translation is welcome, even necessary every 10 years or so -- to welcome the young to the precipice.

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Just Living: Poems and Prose Tonna, Translated from the Japanese by Steven D. Carter; Columbia University Press: 250 pp., $12.95 paper

Steven D. CARTER’S pristine and graceful translations have guided so many readers through untrammeled territory in Eastern religions. Japanese poet Tonna (pronounced Ton’a), for example, wrote in the classical, elite uta form in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Tonna came from a high-ranking military family and entered the priesthood in his early 20s to follow “the Way of poetry” to enlightenment. Because he had no court rank, no aristocratic lineage, he was not immediately accepted by the great Nijo masters of the period. His own poems were not published until 1360 (when he was 71) and finally, in 1364, he was asked to compile the imperial anthology, assuring his place in the history of the art form. Carter, dean of UC Irvine’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, has chosen 134 poems from “Soanshu,” or “Grass Hut,” a collection of 1,446 poems. Here is a taste from “Plum Blossoms Before the Moon”:

Leaving unclosed

my door

of black pine,

I go

to bed for the night,

pillowed on an arm

awash

in plum scent -- and light

from the moon.

“Snow on the Bay”

Even the pathways

of fisherfolk

working along shore

are covered over;

and on boats

plying the bay --

white snow piling up.

Tonna also wrote “Seiasho,” or “Notes of a Frog at the Bottom of a Well,” which included important passages by earlier masters and advice: “At the time of ... ‘The Seven Hundred Poem Sequence,’ the poem strip of Shinkan was blown into the stream by the wind on his way to the palace, so he presented it on a towel, in a very unsightly state. One should be prepared for such things.”