I’m on an airplane, working on my translation of Kiyotsune into Italian. The beauty of the poetry is too much to take and I cannot stop the tears rolling down my face. I do my best not to be too self-indulgent, but… It sometimes happen at okeiko, too, and I think I saw my teacher also crying when we were rehearsing the ji-utai for Tomoe.
Anyways, I just wanted to jot down a brief thought, perhaps a truism. I feel lucky not being a Japanese native speaker because otherwise I would not be able to enjoy bringing Kiyotsune into my native language. All this work of searching, decoding, reflecting, writing, re-writing, changing, making mistakes, correcting them, modelling, adapting…. Translating… What a delight. What a moment of deep transformation and union with the character. Translation can’t be betrayal as long as one accepts that in this life everything is transformed. One thing is thinking it, another is feeling it.