‘Something rich and strange’: Translating Shakespeare's poetry into Japanese

When one reads about the presence of William Shakespeare in another country – especially in a country like Japan, where his works have thrived in translations, performances, intercultural theatre, adaptations, and pop culture – it is easy to imagine that the appeal of his drama there stems from some transcendent quality, something universal. It is still a regularly repeated commonplace that Shakespeare's work speaks to human nature; that he is, to quote Ben Jonson, ‘not of an age, but for all time’, and his worldwide popularity is often cited as confirmation that he may be of all places too. ¹ Indeed, Harold Bloom considers that Shakespeare's work shares with the Bible ‘a certain universalism, global and multicultural’, which accounts for ‘his pervasive presence in the most unlikely contexts: here, there and everywhere’. ² However, as Kiernan Ryan observes, ‘The contention that … Shakespeare has the capacity to appeal to people in all times and places, whatever their nationality, race, gender, language, creed or sexual orientation, because it reflects a universal experience that everyone can identify with or relate to, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny for a moment’. ³ The dominant academic approaches of the last few decades have demonstrated the many ways in which Shakespeare is most certainly of his time and place. In literary theory, postcolonial criticism especially has raised objections to the so-called ‘universality’ of Shakespeare by stressing the ways in which his works were introduced to other countries ‘in the baggage of empire’, often co-opted in the service of cultural imperialism that sought to displace languages, or as a deployment of soft power. ⁴ Even where Shakespeare has become part of the culture in such countries – as in India, where there is a rich, if not unproblematic, history of Shakespeare studies and performance – there is good reason to be sceptical about the universality of works by an early modern male English writer. ⁵

In Japan, Westernisation, in the name of modernisation, was conducted as a defence against colonial threats and might be termed ‘self-colonisation’, but it is also true that Shakespeare ‘was taken up voluntarily, on their own terms and not through direct political imposition’. ⁶ One cannot forget, either, that this wish to be placed on the same footing as the Western nations colonising the world stimulated Japan's own colonisation of surrounding nations, and therefore, that many of the postcolonial debates are inapplicable to the country. ⁷ For instance, since English education was never imposed on Japan, it is free from many of the complicated tensions that arise from the dissemination of Western literature and theatre in a postcolonial context. The Japanese have none of the ‘colonial double-bind’ involved for those, for instance, ‘loving Shakespeare while living in India’. ⁸

The fact that Japan was not forced to engage with Western texts in English means that its relationship to translations of English literature is significantly different from those of postcolonial countries. As Sisir Kumar Das points out, ‘the most influential section of the Indian literary community, unlike … the Japanese, did not require translations of Shakespeare’ so that ‘translated works were never treated with respect’. ⁹ The respect given to translations in Japan is a sign of greater dependence on them. Without knowing the nature of these translations, it will be difficult for a critic to comprehend the presence of Shakespeare in Japan. The fact that the plays are popular in a non-anglophone country where his works were not forced on the populace can lead to the perception that his plays must be admired for more or less the same reason an anglophone audience watches or reads the plays. The purpose of this essay is to interrogate this assumption afresh through a consideration of the difficulties of translating poetry into a language so far removed from English. For as Kumiko Humperdinck-Sakamoto has argued, ‘a study of adaptation and translation can most effectively counter the claim that human nature is universally one and the same regardless of cultural differences’. ¹⁰ Contrary to the belief that Shakespeare's works radiate a universality that speaks to all, it may be the very foreignness of his writing that is the key to his popularity.

Even some of the keenest audiences of Shakespeare performances in Japan may not know that his plays are poetic dramas. This is because, since the early twentieth century, predominantly prose translations that prioritise the meaning of the lines have been customary in Japanese Shakespeare translations. This is not to say that translators have been unconscious of rhythm, line lengths, and other poetic features of the plays. ¹¹ Indeed, translators are often distinguished by the length of their translations, decisions about wordplay, and how much of the English word order is kept for poetic purposes. However, the translation of poetic drama is not a pure exercise in poetic translation, since it must also communicate a story to an audience through speech. Under such conditions, it is no surprise that narrative and immediate comprehension might take precedence over the inexact effects of poetry. When the choice is either to translate the meaning of a dialogue or attempt to retain the poetic features in which the dialogue is expressed, the priority is obvious. Here, at least, the aphorism attributed to Robert Frost that ‘poetry is what gets left out in translation’, is literally true, since translators focus on story and speech over poetry. ¹² Still, as Peter Robinson points out, ‘the meaning of a poem is inseparable from its structure’. ¹³ The practical reasons why Shakespeare's work is translated into prose must be granted, but the issues surrounding poetic translation cannot be overlooked.

The translation of poetry is a complex topic because it involves both theoretical and practical considerations. It is important to establish, from a philosophical perspective, what constitutes poetry and what it means to translate poetry, but it is equally necessary to engage analytically with the practical ways translators have actually approached the task. These two areas do not always sit together comfortably, since the abstract considerations of the former are not necessarily helpful to the latter, and because real-life translators do not generally work with current trends of translation theory in mind. Nor is either category monolithic, since theorists will disagree with one another just as much as translators will differ in their approach to similar problems. Nevertheless, this essay will attempt to enlist both of these two key approaches to translation to consider the difficulties of translating Shakespeare's poetry, and what such problems might reveal about his writing and its presence in and outside of the anglophone world.

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From a theoretical perspective, poetry famously presents a problem for translation because it relies on the web of sounds and meanings that make up the world of the language in which it is written and because what counts as prosody varies in different languages. A poem is constructed by weaving together rhythms, sounds, and echoes between words. Thus, when in Titus Andronicus Titus declares that Lavinia is ‘the weeping welkin, I the earth’ (3.1.227), the anglophone reader not only comprehends the archaic sound of ‘welkin’ but also hears the watery sounds of the alliteration of ‘weeping welkin’, contained within which is well, the sense of an endless supply of tears, and also ‘kin’, the family relationship that prompts this empathic response from Titus. ¹⁴ Such interpretations have little to do with the literal definition of ‘welkin’: the connections are in the sounds and networks of meaning that rely on a contextual familiarity with English. While a translator may convey Titus's metaphorical comparison of Lavinia to a rainy sky and himself to the earth, certain prosodic significances and evocative aspects of the language that are part of an anglophone audience's experience of ‘Shakespeare’ cannot be expressed in every language.

There can be no wholesale reconstruction of a poem in another language, since, ipso facto, a different language does not share the same words, sounds, history, or grammar. Even Derrida, who maintains that nothing ‘can ever be untranslatable – or, moreover, translatable’, since every translation simultaneously preserves and overcomes its source through difference and repetition, acknowledges that there are peculiar difficulties pertaining to the translation of poetry, and particularly ‘meter, rhythm, caesura, rhyme’, which he admits are ‘all the classic constraints and limits that are in principle and in fact insurmountable by translation’. ¹⁵ The postmodern deconstruction of the implied hierarchy between translation and original is certainly useful in eschewing the kind of thinking that privileges the idea of the ‘original’. However, while the egalitarian bent of such thinking is welcome, equality is not the same as homogeny, and the differences between source and translation are still worth scrutinising for what they may reveal. This essay will focus especially on those structural aspects of poetry that are ‘insurmountable by translation’.

All translations must prioritise one of several meanings, but poetry is not simply a question of words: there are formal, aural, and evocative aspects in addition to the definition of the words that make up the poem. Unlike ordinary discourse, poetry uses language non-instrumentally, co-opting the accidents of its sound, its rhythms, and its resonances to multiply the effects and conjure manifold meanings from each line. At its best, poetry uses language to evoke meanings beyond the limits of everyday communication, and thus a prose rendition of a poetic text, in choosing the words above the other aspects of poetry, cannot but suffer from the loss of form, metre, and word order. Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he wrote poetic drama, and as Simon Palfrey points out, ‘verse drama is not merely drama written in verse. It requires that the fact of verse is animate with the stuff of the drama – embodying it, moving with it, rather than merely a line-length container for articulating it’. ¹⁶ The poetic form of Shakespeare's plays is a significant feature of his work.

Between languages that share a common root or similar poetic traditions, it may not seem so difficult to overcome the challenges of rhythm, rhyme, and homophones in translation. Many countries have well-respected verse translations of Shakespeare, such as the celebrated works of August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Ludwig and Dorothea Tieck that are widely regarded in Germany as ‘“classic” Shakespeare translations with a literary status of their own’. ¹⁷ Schlegel worked according to the principle that ‘prose versions of poems are … reprehensible. Metre should never be mere outward ornamentation, nor is it ever in authentic poems; it is rather one of the most original and constitutive elements of poetry’, and therefore that ‘one of the first principles of the art of translation must be to render a poem, so far as the target language allows, into the same meter as in the original’. ¹⁸ One might suspect Schlegel of a now somewhat outdated notion of fidelity in the idea that translation must retain something of the original, but his observation that metre is part of what makes poetry is astute. Schlegel translates into verse because it is an ontological feature of the original poetic drama.

But while the metre of poetry may be integral to a poem's identity, translating into metre requires considerably more interpretive input from the translator. On the more modern foundation that translation is not truly an exercise in preservation or fidelity, Lawrence Venuti observes that ‘translation communicates not the source text, but an interpretation of it, one among different possibilities’. ¹⁹ Poetic translation especially depends on what qualities of the poetry struck the translator as reader, and their approximation of what might create a similar effect in the target language. Schlegel's insistence about retaining metre must be understood, then, as the best alternative in the inexact feat of poetic translation. Even he could not but admit that ‘in the end even the finest translation is at best an approximation to an indeterminable degree; for otherwise one would have to achieve precisely the same results with totally different tools and means, which is in the strict sense impossible’. ²⁰ Thus in Europe, the alexandrine metre, similar in its history to the romance languages as iambic pentameter is to English, is often used for verse translations of Shakespeare. Whether or not one can mimic the metre of the source text, poetic translation is at best a recreation using different materials. Theoretically speaking, then, formal aspects are part of what makes poetry poetic, but while verse translations respect the nature of the source text, such an exercise invariably involves more interpretation than a prose translation.

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In practice, however, Shakespeare's work is often translated without its poetic form. Prose versions of poems may have been reprehensible to Schlegel, but as he acknowledges, ‘the same meter as the original’ can only be kept ‘so far as the target language allows’. There are languages in which one cannot even imagine poetry and metre in the same way. This is the case with Japanese, which, unlike most Indo-European languages, is not stress-based, being phonologically moraic, and relying on a pitch-accent structure. ²¹ If there are no stresses, how can there be iambic pentameter? Since neither metrical, rhymed, nor blank verse translation are possible, at least three of André Lefevere's seven methods of poetic translation, for instance, are simply inapplicable to Japanese. ²² The sheer difference between the languages often prompts comparisons such as Tetsuo Anzai's, to the detriment of translation:

Any translation, especially that of poetry, however skilfully and scrupulously done, cannot but be a pale and feeble imitation of the original, but in the case of the Japanese translation of Shakespeare, in which the distance between the background of the original and that of the translation is linguistically, dramatically, culturally and historically so great, the difficulty is overwhelming. To put it bluntly, it is simply impossible to re-create in Japanese the power and subtlety, depth and wealth of Shakespeare's language. ²³

A Japanese translator has several options for dealing with English poetry. The first is to use a native form. In the case of Japanese poetic drama, this would be the five-seven mora pattern that underlies most poetry and which is used in Kabuki and Noh. Indeed, the Noh chant (Utai) separation into poetry (inbun) and prose (sanbun) does have similarities to Shakespeare's differentiation between poetry and prose. Like Schlegel, the nineteenth-century scholar and novelist Soseki Natsume claimed that the accent and structure of Shakespeare's writing is central to the experience and understanding of his plays, since ‘Shakespeare is a poet, and the words of poets run about a heaven and earth beyond common sense’. ²⁶ Natsume thus criticised Shoyo Tsubouchi's translation of Hamlet in 1911 by making a case for a domesticating translation that finds a verse equivalent: ‘one must proceed on the assumption that Shakespeare's lines can only retain interest [when spoken] in the exceptional tones of something like Noh or Utai’. ²⁷ Although Natsume was essentially of the mind that Shakespeare could not be translated into Japanese, if it had to be done, then a form with a similar capacity to iambic pentameter must be used. It is not that such attempts had not been made. The earliest translations of Shakespeare were Kabuki adaptations, and even Tsubouchi's first attempt at Shakespeare translation used Joruri, the Kabuki chanting style, complete with descriptive passages. ²⁸ That many other Meiji era adapters chose to use a native poetic style also speaks to a desire to make a version that would feel familiar to their readers.

One problem with recreating the poetics of Shakespeare's plays in a different tradition is how to judge whether a style such as Joruri or Utai is really the equivalent of blank verse. As Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw have observed, ‘translating Shakespeare's verse into Japanese verse, which might sound eminently sensible, actually involves translating one kind of verse into another, utterly different and arguably alien kind of verse’. ²⁹ One might defend the use of alexandrine metre in Europe as having a similar cultural status as iambic pentameter, ostensibly providing, to European ears, the same sort of feeling that anglophones receive when hearing Shakespeare's lines in English, especially as the two-verse forms are closely related. But, aside from the fact that verse is only one aspect of poetry, and that it is difficult to establish the aural experience of an audience in any objective way, it is not clear that there is any equivalent metre in Japanese that can produce a similar effect. It is also worth noting that while traditional Japanese poetry may have been familiar to Natsume and the early adapters of Shakespeare, it is no longer as well known to the general ear as it once was, as is evident from the scholar and translator Shoichiro Kawai's choice to use Kabuki-style metre for the play-within-the-play in Hamlet, at the express suggestion of Kyogen actor Mansai Nomura. ³⁰ Japanese poetic metre is no longer the natural poetic style to adopt in translation but something utilised to sound archaic. Of course, given that blank verse has become equally archaic to the anglophone ear, the fact that Japanese poetry has come to sound dated might not be such a problem. I will return to this point below.

While there is much to be said for respecting the nature of the plays as verse drama, translating Shakespeare into a different poetic tradition also imposes considerable limitations on what the translator can do within the strict spatial constraints of the form, and may come at the expense of other poetic features. Hence the dilemma identified by Daniel Gallimore:

The Japanese translator who forces a rigid equivalent of Shakespearean lyric with the seven-five syllabic metre of Japanese tradition risks ignoring the rhetorical dimension of the source. Conversely, the translator who makes no reference to poetic tradition risks denying the audience the sense that Shakespeare originally wrote poetic drama. ³¹

Since there is no equivalence, ‘the translation of style is an exercise in pastiche, the translator's task being the choice of an existing style in the target culture to serve as a rough match for the “other”’. ³² When the poetic tradition is so far removed from English as to necessitate a complete change in poetic style, the resulting translation is more likely to be treated as an adaptation, as is invariably the case in studies of early Japanese Kabuki ‘translations’. Shorter translated poems that use an equivalent style are generally termed translations, but as Palfrey points out, ‘Shakespeare's dramatic verse is not best understood as poetry, which can be to detach the forms from action’. ³³ Verse drama is poetic, but not the same as other forms of poetry. Just as a narration of the stories alone will no longer be a translation of Shakespeare's work, the poetry of his lines cannot be divorced entirely from the plays, as anyone who has tried to excerpt beautiful quotations from Shakespeare's plays will know. Contrary to James Shapiro's assertion that ‘the only Shakespearean thing about his plays is the language’, one cannot extract one feature of Shakespeare's work and exclaim ecce homo. ³⁴

The translator's second option is to invent a new poetic form or attempt to introduce poetic forms from the source language into the target culture. In the case of languages closer to English, for instance, some claim that when one can, one ought to retain the pentameter line, even if alien to the target culture. ³⁵ In Japan, early-twentieth-century translations of Western poetry attempted to come up with a sonnet structure that married Western rhyming patterns with Japanese moraic poetry. ³⁶ The incorporation of poetic features from Western poetry was a refreshing aspect of these experiments, especially since ‘new modes of expression gave rise to a new awareness of the sounds of language’ such as aural patterning and rhyme. ³⁷ Yet even in the most radical experiments of this kind, it is evident that metre could not be imposed on Japanese poetry. As Katsuya Sugiwara observes, ‘given that Japanese has no system of stressing certain syllables within a word, aside from the intonation practice using sound pitch, reproducing in Japanese accentuated syllabic patterns of European languages such as English and German was a practical impossibility’. ³⁸ Even so, these experimental translator–poets did influence Shakespeare translation, especially translations of the sonnets, where, though metre tends to be moraic when present, most translators have been conscious and playful in their use of sound. ³⁹

More lately, there has been an increased effort to recreate English verse styles in Shakespeare translations. Kawai, for instance, has been forefront of his effort ‘to reconstruct the original sound structure, replacing blank verse with rhythmical Japanese of a somewhat archaic nature, transforming heroic couplets into a Kabuki-like formalistic style, and expressing prose in natural modem Japanese’, arguing that ‘it is no longer sufficient to translate the mere meanings of the words as previous translators have done’, because ‘how the lines sound on stage is as important as what they mean’. ⁴⁰ Kawai's early translations often experiment with the incorporation of Japanese moraic metre to make audible shifts in the spoken language of the plays. He aims ‘to simulate Shakespeare's writerly technique: iambic pentameter should be expressed in a certain rhythm, rhyming couplets should sound theatrical, and a prosaic tirade as in the Nunnery Scene should be rapid’. ⁴¹ In other words, these artistic choices allow him to register prosodic changes in the source text using existing Japanese poetic forms. In his more recent translations, though, Kawai moves beyond the use of prose and Japanese metre. He incorporates rhymes that a Japanese audience might hear and attempts to mimic trochaic tetrameter in his translation of the Weird Sisters’ lines in Macbeth and Puck's lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Although rhymes are not a practical impossibility in Japanese, given that almost all morae end in a vowel sound, rhyme tends to sound contrived and doggerel. Sound patterning is thus rarely meaningful and does not form part of traditional Japanese prosody. However, given that Shakespeare's rhymes are often written to be audibly noticeable, as in scene endings, for instance, adding rhyme to Japanese translations can create a theatrical effect that other more naturalistic translations do not have, and work differently in the theatre. ⁴² The attempt at stress-based rhythm in Japanese is more complicated, since, as mentioned above, stress is not an inherent part of Japanese spoken language. Kawai overcomes this problem in his consciously stress-based sections by writing lines to be read in a certain way, with footnoted instructions and a note on their resemblance to the ‘sing-song rhythm as in Mother Goose’, ⁴³ borrowing from music a way of expressing the extra rhythm that cannot be dictated by language alone in Japanese. Although the constraints on the translator are considerably increased and it is not always possible to retain both metre and rhyme in such sections, Kawai's attempts are innovative and suggest new possibilities for Shakespeare translation in Japanese.

The fact that Kawai requires actors to impose spoken rhythms onto Japanese for parts written in tetrameter – and that this metre requires additional instructions – is worth further comment. The dictation of rhythm means that the metre is no longer an implicit part of the poetic form: the translation requires supplementary performance directives, as in musical notation. This is the only way that one might create something that sounds somewhat like stressed verse in Japanese, and it may explain why Kawai has not provided similar instructions to make actors speak something like iambic pentameter lines for the whole play, since the addition of such stresses creates a song-like diction which may sound too light-hearted or comical, making it inappropriate in many scenes, especially in a tragedy. Although it works for otherworldly characters such as Puck and the Weird Sisters, whose verse has been differentiated by Shakespeare, if all the characters spoke with added rhythms it may end up sounding like musical theatre or Shakespeare performed entirely in rap: innovative and interesting, but perhaps not a widely performable translation.

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Practical experiments raise theoretical questions. In the present case, the attempt to recreate the sound of an English text resurrects the age-old issue of equivalence. Can mimicking English metre really create the same or even equivalent effect in an audience unused to hearing such rhythms? How is one to measure such equivalence? As Susan Bassnett observes, ‘the principle of equivalent effect which has enjoyed great popularity in certain cultures at certain times, involves us in areas of speculation and at times can lead to very dubious conclusions’. ⁴⁴ The defence of translational choices still regularly reverts to the claim of equivalence, but equivalence cannot be established objectively. On the surface, the addition of extra-linguistic rhythms may make a Japanese translation of Shakespeare sound somewhat like an anglophone production, but given that a stressed accent is natural to English, and alien to Japanese, the effect will be similar to trying to perform a translated Noh play by speaking English in a staccato manner with pitched syllables, whatever that may sound like. If part of what works about Shakespeare's poetic choice of blank verse is that it does not sound too far off the natural rhythms of English speech, then recreating a part of the poetry without the context in which that poetic form functions are unlikely to create a similar aural experience for a non-anglophone audience.

It is one of the complexities of translation that, just as a meaning of a word is made up of the multiple allusions and associations that surround the context of such a word – what Derrida conceptualises as the deferral of meaning – comprehension of a sound, expression or rhythm is also dependent on familiarity for meaning. This has much in common with Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory that comprehension rests on what he calls ‘the concretion of historically effected consciousness’, or ‘effective history’ (Wirkungsgeschichte), the historically contingent hermeneutic network that forms the foundation on which other things come to make sense. ⁴⁵ Such a horizon of comprehension is not concrete or unchanging, but it means that some things are easier to understand because they fit one's social and historical knowledge. It is for this reason that Asian musical scale patterns can sound jarring to a Western ear, just as Western conceptions of tempo and harmony would have been alien to Japan in their initial reception. In the case of music, there were strong socio-political reasons for Japan to adopt Western styles, so that Western music came to form part of the effective history of most Japanese people. ⁴⁶ But while the introduction of new concepts and familiarity can change the effective history of a culture, it is highly unlikely that a language will change to adopt the spoken patterns of another language. As already suggested, a non-native rhythm can be added to a language as in a song, but this does not change the fundamental metre of the language.

As is evident from Kawai's comparison of the Weird Sisters’ tetrameter with Mother Goose, the Japanese audience will have some familiarity with the sing-song style of a nursery rhyme, which thus forms part of the effective history of the audience, albeit one based on experiences of imported texts. Yet, this familiarity with song cannot stretch to speech taken as speech. To a certain extent, it is possible and meaningful for a translator to invent or import poetic styles from English; but, if the style thus imported does not resemble anything like poetry in the effective history of the audience, it may not be taken as poetical. It might instead be understood as song. As I put it once before in an article on translation in Kurosawa's Ran, the problem is whether ‘what constitutes “poetry” in English is equally poetic in the translated language’ – an audience must have the hermeneutic understanding necessary to comprehend the translated text as poetry. ⁴⁷ As implied in the brief discussion of rhyme above, to be acknowledged as poetry, a text must fit what counts as ‘poetic’ in that language. Importing poetic styles cannot guarantee equivalence of effect any more than adapting into native forms.

Indeed, it is not only metre but also rhyme that works against the notion of the poetic in Japanese. As Jane Hirshfield observes, ‘Japanese poetry attains remarkable emotional depth within a brief utterance’, and this briefness lends itself to ‘suggestiveness, the ability to convey through a few lightly sketched phrases an evocative situation, [which] is considered one of the great strengths in Japanese poetry’. ⁴⁸ Laconism is a crucial part of what makes poetry poetic to a Japanese sensibility; and Shakespeare's beautiful loquacity, even as it conjures more than it says in words, could not be further from this conception of poetry. However well his works are translated, then, the sheer number of words the characters use to express themselves cannot but make Shakespeare's poetry sound foreign to Japanese ears. This is part of the reason that ‘translated texts usually retain a certain “foreignness” in them, whether it is a translators’ intention or not’. ⁴⁹ At a fundamental level, there can be no domestication of Shakespeare that is not a heavily cut adaptation such as Kurosawa's consummately laconic Throne of Blood.

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Whether or not a Shakespearean drama's ‘translatedness’ is always before a Japanese audience, its foreignness is ever present, partly because it derives from a poetic tradition so far removed from the Japanese language. There is nothing of the German tradition of claiming Shakespeare as ‘unser Shakespeare’, one of their own. As Kishi and Bradshaw argue, ‘although the Japanese are so obviously fascinated by Shakespeare … Their Shakespeare is always foreign’. ⁵⁰ It is not a stretch to theorise, then, that the popularity of Shakespeare in Japan is not due to universality, but because his works provide a window into a different and unknown world of meanings, and poetry. It gives the impression that one can experience the foreign without having to go abroad or learn a new language, much like visiting the reconstruction of Shakespeare's birthplace in Maruyama, Chiba prefecture. Hisae Niki comments that ‘translation … is like opening a new window into the mind of the Japanese people. It may also be called a cushion between Japanese culture and foreign ones’; and the opposite may also be true: translation opens a window for Japanese people into the Western mind, Western poetry, and into the mind of a writer so respected by the world. ⁵¹

Contrary to the assumption that Shakespeare is popular around the world because his works are universal and, therefore, instantly familiar to people of any background, there is a possibility that his popularity in a country like Japan stems at least partly from the very fact of the foreignness of his works, poetry, and expressions. This may sound like an occidentalist conclusion, but the native-foreign divide is not so much an East-West divide as a question of our own positions in relation to Shakespeare. The foreignness of Shakespeare is not unique to Japan, or even to the global Shakespeare generally conceived. Although there are many meaningful ways in which Shakespeare still speaks to a modern audience, the language and even the poetic style of his work is not familiar to the majority of English speakers; even an expert does not comprehend Shakespeare as readily as modern English. In Ton Hoenselaars's words,

Shakespeare's early modern work is really a fixed product in a ‘foreign’ language that no one speaks any more, except on the stage and other performance platforms, or in inverted commas … if there is a language barrier anywhere, it does not operate between Shakespeare and non-native readers or audiences of his work in translation, but rather separates native speakers of English from their own early modern writer. ⁵²

An audience in Japan enjoys Shakespeare partly for the foreignness of his work, but does not an anglophone audience also enjoy the unfamiliar? There are members of an audience who take pleasure in feeling that they understand what is being said – a joy indicating that ready understanding is not the common experience. Certainly, some of the excitement of studying Shakespeare can be in understanding meanings remote to a modern reader due to linguistic and cultural differences between the past and present, or even between present and future, as Kiernan Ryan argues, asserting that Shakespeare writes from ‘an imagined perspective … still ahead of our time’. ⁵⁴ A consideration of the complexities of poetic translation might alert us to the fact that unfamiliarity is not limited to distances in time or space, for the very fact that they are poetic means that Shakespeare's work has never been transparent. Not even in his own age could his multifarious meanings have been understood completely by all. While Robert Fitzgerald makes the point that, in translation, ‘to make something that is strange to our ears would not be doing justice to the work that was not strange to theirs’; ⁵⁵ by the same logic, one might consider that a strange translation is satisfactory if it reflects the already strange nature of the source text.

Shakespeare's poetry does not translate neatly into Japanese. The metrical form cannot be recreated through language alone – it can only be added through performance instructions – and poetic features such as extended metaphor or rhyme are not part of what sounds natively ‘poetic’ to Japanese ears. But this does not mean it is meaningless to attempt a translation, nor can the only conclusion be that certain aspects of Shakespeare's poetry are untranslatable into another language. Rather, the fact that it cannot be translated might prompt a reappreciation of the fact that Shakespeare does write in poetry and that poetry, relying as it does on linguistic and cultural meanings and contexts – including what one perceives as poetic – is not easily translatable even intralingually. The untranslatability of Shakespeare's poetry can highlight the strangeness of his writing and our own relation to it, regardless of our cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Since Shakespeare never was and never will be our contemporary, if there is any kind of universality, is it not our distance? We all look upon Shakespeare's work as ‘something rich and strange’ (The Tempest, 1.2.402). ⁵⁶