This article was published in November 2017, in the journal of the Ooka Makoto Society of Japan. It is based on the lecture I gave on September 25, 2016 at the 7th Meeting of the Ooka Makoto Kenkyukai at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. The subject is my translation into English of Oriori no uta/Poems for All Seasons, Ooka Makoto’s anthology of Japanese poetry.
The article is divided into three parts. The first two parts describe in detail the process of translating two poems, with facsimiles of the faxes that Ooka and I exchanged during that process. In the lecture, the third part was a bi-lingual reading of several of the poems, with comments about them. In the article, the content of the third part remains the same but is called さまざまの訳のうらばさし(translation backstories). The questions from the audience after the lecture become the last part of the article, and are rendered pretty much verbatim. Since there is quite a lot of English content (both Ooka and I wrote our faxes in English) I think that even those without Japanese may find the article of interest, especially the first part, since there they can follow the way the translations changed as the result of the interchange between Ooka and me.