Interview with Royall Tyler

03/28/2018

MacKenzie Bruce: Hi Royall Tyler, it’s Mackenzie and Eric. Happy to be having this phone conversation with you today. We had a couple of questions pre-prepared that we wanted to ask you generally about the Tale of the Heike. One of the first ones that we were interested in was what difficulties did you have in translating the text, if there were any?

Royall Tyler: I think I discussed the principal difficulty in the introduction, it seemed to me that although the text when printed looks like prose, prose doesn’t really work for it because the whole thing was sung, and so I wanted to try to translate it into well uh a so I ended up translating the sung passages I should say I had an addition which indicates how each passage is performed at least the type of vocalization associated with it, and so I wanted to translate the passages that are sung into verse of some kind, I wrote my way along to find the sort of verse that I could manage.

MacKenzie: From reading your introduction, it’s easy enough to see where that come through during the reading and seeing based on the spacing which is the main thing that keeps it congruent and helps us to figure out exactly what’s trying to be said there. I think that you did a really good job there of making sure the reader understood this based on the information included in the introduction.

Royall: On the other end of the continuum of sung verse, the passages which are in sort of medieval bureacratise are sort of conveying the tone of pompous bureaucratic language also.

MacKenzie: Part of the reading which I enjoyed was that there are certain parts – that don’t use modern language but certain terms or phrase which seems more modern than what would have been said back then.

Royall: Yes, I’ve heard this talk about in general translation which mention modern terms or phrase would not have existed at the time – that is a misconception. Of course, none of the expressions used in the translation were used in the 14^th century, not one. So it’s not as though the occasional phrase sounds modern ot the reader’s ears now, is untypical of the time, it’s just that the reader associates the expression with something modern. I’ll mention an expression that Professer Oyler brought up in a review of my translation, in which I used the expression “raining cats and dogs”. Which, my mother used, and Professor Oyler thought that this was too modern and atypical of the time. It turns out that it was used in the late 14^th century in English. So just because an expression sounds modern to you, doesn’t mean that it is inappropriate, but there are limits to this. Anything that sounds too contemporary to me, that I would hear on TV, I would not use. I used a kind of diction which sounded to me, appropriate. And there are shifts in tone from passage to passage of course.

Eric Anzalone: I’m curious because I believe you started out translating Noh plays before transitioning into the Tale of Genji. How was translating the Tale of Genji compared to the Tale of the Heike?

Royall: Totally different. The language of the original is totally different. The Tale of Genji is in a women’s voice and about a world which is radically different from that of the Tale of the Heike. The style in the original is linguistically different but also has a quite different feel in terms of idioms and expression. I think there is a difference between female and male diction, and it’s hard to define, I think impossible, but rather one can feel it. I did my best to sound as close as I could to female diction. I don’t think I succeeded perfectly, but I did my best. Whereas in the Tale of the Heike, it is extremely masculine.

MacKenzie: How did you get involved in the field of translation in the first place?

Royall: I think it was in 1966 I took a course with Donald Keane at Colombia reading Noh texts and he assigned each student, about 8 of us, a Noh play to translate as a term paper. That’s when I discovered that I really enjoyed translating, and I didn’t know that before. That was the seed.

MacKenzie: I feel like translating is one of those things that you have to happen upon.

Royall: Translationg is something that some people do, that some people particularly enjoy doing, some people do not. I worked with a colleague who wanted something translated but knew perfectly well he was not a good translator and would’ve done it himself otherwise. Some people may recognize the value of translation, but know that they aren’t good at it, and some people more like me, end up doing a lot of translation because that’s the sort of thing that comes naturally to them. It’s something that you end up realizing that you like to do, and perhaps increasingly in my case over the decades, do well. So Genji for me, was when I gave up. I realized fine, I’ll do it, so I just went ahead with it. I was very conscious of translating the world view which was not exactly natural to me. Whereas in translating the Tale of the Heike, I felt like I had come home. It’s masculine, it really is. The whole enterprise is extremely masculine, and it felt much more natural. When translating the Tale of Genji, I had to work out a form of translating that didn’t come naturally to me. By the time I got to the Tale of the Heike, I had already gotten a lot of experience from translating the Tale of Genji. I hardly ever revised or edited, it just came very naturaly, and was much faster to translate.

Eric: If you could go back in time, would you still have translated the Tale of Genji first, or would you have chosen to do Heike first?

Royall: The Tale of Genji, as I’m sure you know, is the sort of Everest of Japanese literature, and I was ambitious. It was the challenge before, it never occurred to me to translate the Tale of the Heike first. I just went for it.

Mackenzie: Do you have something you’re currently working on?

Royall: Last December I published my last academic translation from Japanese. It’s called Iwashimizu Hachiman in War and Cult. I am currently working on something from French. I went to high school in France. I’m doing a book, which will be my last book on the very important French folklore collector who made a fantastic folklore/folktale from central France, so I am doing a book to introduce him in English, and then provide a selection of the tales he selected in English. I am really enjoying it, and it’s a lot easier than Japanese too.

Mackenzie: Do you have a specific character in the Tale of the Heike that you relate to or enjoyed the most?

Royall: No, not really. Kiyomori is pretty fun though, and Shigemori is a little sanctimonious indeed. I don’t think I do, they’re all very interesting. I don’t particularly identify with any of them, they’re just great characters.

Eric: Do you have a character that you dislike the most?

Royall: Well I’m glad that none of the stuff in the book is happening to me. But it's like watching a movie, the fascinating and interesting people and their doings, and yeah of course, Kiyomori is obnoxious. Quite a few of the rest of them are as well, but it’s part of the human colony as I’ve called it. It is after all those centuries, I don’t have to think if I really hate somebody or like them or not.

Mackenzie: Was there a specific chapter or part that was especially difficult to translate in the Tale of the Heike?

Royall: The most difficult passages to translate was the final book kanojo no maki. Which is about Kenreimon-in at Ohara, and was very touching, and I put a lot of special effort into that. Linguistically, the most difficult passages are often the memoranda that these temples send each other, in medieval bureacratise. Those are very tricky, the most difficult are the prayers. There is the formal prayer addressed to deities, and it’s hard to decipher what language they are in, because it is very formal, flowery, and elaborate. But I don’t think that there was any particular book which was especially difficult. In one of the books, the one that is all in prose at the end, was disappointing. I thought, “Oh, well what happened here”.

Eric: In class we talked about the Bushido spirit mentioned in the book, and the idea that the Bushido spirit isn’t really flushed out until the Edo period. So, I was curious as it’s relevance to the Genpei War and the Tale of the Heike.

Royall: Bushido became kind of “idealized” in the Edo period. Before then, there were lots of war tales, the Heike is the great masterpiece of them, but there are a good number of them later on, I’ve translated several of them. You can see in them particularly in the ones after Heike, a tendency to worship the virtues of the warrior. In the contemporary world, military men and the military spirit are often idealized. That doesn’t mean that military men now, or back then, necessarily adhere to the values when they're actually in combat. In medieval Japan there is all sorts of stuff going that isn’t ideal. People flee, are cowardly, drop out, desert, of course they are; they always are. As far as I know, I’m sure Professor Oyler has been saying the same thing, it became easier to idealize the way of the warrior once they weren’t fighting anymore. They could all claim to uphold the highest virtues of the idealized warrior and they didn’t have to follow through in fact.