掲載した作品は主として原題が『The Season for Losing』という氏の本の翻訳でしたが、それに近年書かれた30作品を加え計101作品を翻訳しました。 原題 『The Season for Losing』は、『喪失の季(とき)』とでも訳しましょうか。収められた詩歌には朋友や妻の死を偲び、その後の人生の孤独と哀感が詠われています。翻訳をとおし、繰り返し読み精査したあとでの私の感想は、目に見えないものが目に見えるように短い定型詩にあらわされているということです。主として自然界の現象、そのなかの花や樹々等を掬い上げ、それらのものに託し、目に見えない作者の世界と心が表出されているのです。どの一首、どの一句をとっても、単に語句に表出されているだけでなく、語句以外の空間からにじみ出てくるものに味わいがあります。言い換えれば、選ばれた語句が言外の空間へとふくらみ、読み手に広がりと深さ、そして作者の愛に満ちた温かい人柄を感じさせるのです。 本書18番の俳句は
This book is an English-Japanese bilingual edition. The book is printed with premium color ink as there are some pieces of Photo-Haiku.
The following is from "Afterword."
The published works were mainly translations of his book, originally entitled The Season for Losing , but I added 30 pieces he wrote in recent years, making a total of 101 translations. The original title, The Season for Losing , could be translated as 『喪失の季(とき)』. The poems in the collection commemorate the death of his friend and wife and express the loneliness and sorrow of life afterwards. After reading his works repeatedly and scrutinizing my translation, I think that the invisible is visibly expressed in the short fixed-form poems. The poems are mainly based on the phenomena of the natural world, including flowers, trees, etc., and the invisible world and heart of the author are expressed through these objects. Furthermore, each poem has a flavor that is not merely expressed in the words but also comes out from the space outside of the words. In other words, the selected words and phrases expand into the space outside of the words and phrases, giving the reader a sense of breadth, depth, and the warm personality of the author filled with love.
About the 18th haiku in this book,
at her funeral a butterfly flitting from stone to stone
Is this a poem about the scene he saw at his wife's funeral? Did he see a butterfly fluttering in the cemetery and, for a brief moment, a temporary appearance of his late wife? Although there are no words of sorrow in the poem, I could not help but feel a sense of painful mourning. As a translator, I rarely asked the author this or that as a reference for I hesitated to touch his pain. About the 27th haiku that gave this book its title,
in the eyes of a butterfly… dewdrops
Was it the author's eyes that were reflected in the butterfly's eyes? The author found an invisible entity to compose about and express himself in the visible object in nature. When I titled this book, I initially intended to use 『喪失の季(とき)』, but after reading this haiku many times, I got the title of this book In the Eyes of a Butterfly /『胡蝶の目の中』from this haiku.
For the Japanese translation, even though the language forms are different, I intended to translate English tanka into Japanese fixed-form tanka and English haiku into Japanese fixed-form haiku as much as possible. For this reason, I did not translate the poems directly in detail but instead compiled them into Japanese fixed-form poems at once based on my sense of the words. I translated the poems into historical kana and used modern kana notation to ruby (furigana).