tions of suggestion. Perhaps the most interesting remarks for the modern Western reader are those made by the dramatist Chikamatsu about 1720. In speaking of the art of the puppet theatre, he declared:
“There are some who, believing that pathos is essential to a puppet play, make frequent use of such expressions as ‘it was touching’ in their writing, or who when chanting the lines do so in voices thick with tears. This is foreign to my style. I take pathos to be entirely a matter of restraint. When all parts of the art are controlled by restraint, the effect is moving, and thus the stronger and firmer the melody and words are, the sadder will be the impression created. For this reason, when one says of something which is sad that it is sad, one loses the implications, and in the end, even the impression of sadness is slight. It is essential that one not say of a thing that ‘it is sad’, but that it be sad of itself.”[1]
It is interesting to note in this connection that over two centuries later the editor of an anthology of English and American imagist poetry made the same discovery as Chikamatsu and wrote: “Poetry is a matter of rendering, not comment. You must not say: ‘I am so happy’; you must behave as if you were happy.”[2] Imagist poetry was certainly deeply indebted to translations from the Japanese, which perhaps served also to inspire such a critical judgment.[3]
In any case, what was new enough to need saying for Western
- ↑ Translated in Keene, The Battles of Coxinga, p. 95.
- ↑ Ford Madox Ford in Imagist Anthology 1930, p. xiv.
- ↑ One critic of the imagist school asserted, “Their manifestos are prettily adorned with occult reference to Japanese poetry and criticism, with much expenditure of printer’s ink in spelling out exotic-looking syllables in ki, ka and ko.” (Quoted in Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, p. 54.)
