Poets on Translation: Huffing Like a Horse

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

When I was a child in a small Japanese fishing town in the 80s, translation didn’t seem to exist. Whenever foreign words entered Japanese, they’d become fully domesticated: from shirt to shatsu, from elevator to erebētā. They sounded as if they had been part of the language forever. I grew up watching American sitcoms like Full House and Alf, all dubbed, often by well-known Japanese actors or voice actors. Luke Skywalker spoke perfect Japanese and even looked Japanese, dressed in a white robe that resembled a judo uniform.

The first time I became conscious of language differences, I was six or seven. English had been in the air at home since I was little, as my mother enjoyed studying it and encouraged me to learn. Each night, when she tucked me into bed, she’d say, “Have a nice dream,” in English. One night, I asked her why milk was called milk. She was smoking on the stairs after our family inn had closed for the night. When I asked, she exhaled smoke and said nothing. I continued: the Japanese word gyūnyū has two characters, one meaning “cow” and the other meaning “milk,” so it all made sense, but m-i-l-k had none of that cow-ness. She said, “It’s just the way it is in English.” I refused to accept that. She explained again and again until finally she stubbed out her cigarette, released one last puff, and walked away. I wanted milk to match gyūnyū exactly, and the realization that it didn’t frustrated me.

Years later, after I’d moved to the United States for college and was traveling back to Japan each summer, I began to see the gap between languages differently. One afternoon in Japan, I went to a small neighborhood rice shop and asked if they had rice that didn’t require rinsing. “We don’t rinse rice,” the owner said, “we sharpen it.” In Japanese, to sharpen rice is an idiom for rinsing rice, a phrase that once referred to rubbing the grains together to polish away the bran. The verb togu (“to sharpen,” “to hone”) still carries that trace of abrasion, long after modern rice no longer needs it.

I’d never thought about this etymology before: after years of speaking, reading, and writing in English, the phrase reached me as if for the first time. My unwitting mistranslation made me aware of what I’d forgotten, “to sharpen” sleeping inside “to rinse.” That mistake was accidental, but it taught me something I’ve since tried to do on purpose, in both my poems and my translations: to keep shifting between my native language and my adopted language until they become defamiliarized. While my slip at the rice shop revealed the semantic possibilities of togu, my later translations would explore how choosing the “wrong” word might reveal what the “right” one can’t.

The novelist Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, has said she would rather fall into the valley between two languages than master either one. When we travel between two or more languages, each language drifts into the orbits of the others, producing a new language that feels fresh and full of possibility. I see the gap between languages not as a translator’s nightmare but as a field of creative agency. 

Translating a tanka by the contemporary poet Shizuka Omori, I encountered the word mizu aoi (水葵), which, translated literally, means “water hollyhock,” and is the name for a plant with bluish-purple flowers. But I didn’t like the sound—the h’s in “hollyhock” huffed like a horse. Aoi is also a homonym for “blue,” and when I hear mizu aoi, I picture blue water. I chose a mistranslation: “water hyacinth.” Hollyhocks and hyacinths are different plants though both have bluish flowers, but “hyacinth” avoids the huffing in “hollyhock,” and has a softness that feels true to the poem’s mood. 

If all I wanted was pure accuracy, AI could do the work. But I’m more interested in replicating the mood and feeling a poem creates. Because one-to-one correspondence is impossible, especially between languages as different as Japanese and English, sometimes what’s required is willful mistranslation.

Once, while my mother was visiting me in St. Louis, we were walking along a gray, worn intersection on our way to a coffee shop when she suddenly asked me to stand beside a traffic light pole, before taking a photo of me. When I asked why, she pointed to a sign above that read: “Photo Enforced.” She thought it meant, “You must take a photo here.” My mother’s misreading turned a bureaucratic warning into an invitation. She stripped away the threat in favor of something playful, even friendly. In that moment, dictionary definitions loosened, and we stepped into the fluid in-between space where words float free, up for grabs.