On the Hour of Translation

In 1937, Hori Tatsuo was already coughing through the work that would kill him when he set down a Japanese version of Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière marin. The poem was eighteen years old by then — long enough to belong to the previous war, not yet long enough to belong to history. Hori's translation borrowed only its final line, and gave it a new home as the title of a novel.

Valéry's line — Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre! — arrives near the poem's close, after a hundred and forty-three lines of metaphysics about a graveyard above the Mediterranean. It is the moment the speaker turns from the dead and walks back into the wind. Hori rendered it as 風立ちぬ、いざ生きめやも: the wind has risen; let us, then, try to live.

What changes when a French line passes through Mincho? The strokes thicken at their terminals; the diacritics weather slightly, as if copied by a steady hand from a worn page. The line stops being twentieth-century Paris and becomes — for a moment, on this paper — something that could have been written in either country.

The Mincho Hour

Shippori Mincho's Latin glyphs were drawn in Japan, by Japanese designers, to harmonize with Mincho strokes. They were not borrowed from a French foundry and forced to behave; they are native, like a bilingual child who learned both languages before either was a decision.

The blueprint is explicit on this point: Valéry's line is to be set in Shippori Mincho's Latin glyphs, upright, never italic. Italic would be a confession that French is foreign to the page. We refuse the confession. The glyphs were drawn for this exact purpose — to receive a French line and not flinch.

Misregistration is not a failure of the press; it is a position one takes. The image is offset by a single column from where it ought to sit, and the caption refuses to follow it. The reader notices the gold seam — and the page becomes a thing made by hands rather than a thing pretended to be a window.

Hori, in Closing

The line, in its original:

Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!

And the line, after it has slept a night in another language and woken as something subtly its own:

風立ちぬ、いざ生きめやも

Hori died in 1953, sixteen years after the translation. He never lived to see it become a Miyazaki film, a department-store window, a phrase pinned over a desk in a Komaba dormitory. He only ever set it down once, and walked away.