_Japanese Embassy, London._ _November 1912._
Their poetry is the expressed essence of the Japanese. It represents them as the Victory of Samothrace represents the people of Greece, as the scent represents the rose. Chamberlain says, "The one original product of the Japanese mind is the native poetry"--their painting, their porcelain, their ceremonials, are modifications of Chinese classics, but their poetry is their very own. Among the greatest and most characteristic treasures of the native literature, the Japanese rank their ancient "lyric dramas," the _No_. As Synge and the Irish poets speak for the Irish people the things that matter most to them and that yet go all unexpressed in their outward life, in the same sense, only to a greater extent, do the _No_ dramas represent the old spirit of Japan.
In Japanese the texts of the _No_ dramas, all of which were written before the sixteenth century, are collected in a great work, the _Yokyoku Tsukai_, in which various editions give as many as two hundred and thirty-five to two hundred and sixty-two _utai_, as the librettos of the _No_ are called. Yet these treasures are practically unknown to the reading public of the West, notwithstanding the interest that has been taken in "things Japanese." Scholars certainly have paid them some attention, and a few _utai_ have been rendered into English, but in most cases these translations are such as appeal primarily to scholars, and do not reach the wider public. Chamberlain's _Classical Poetry of the Japanese_, in which some of the _utai_ find a place, is perhaps the only exception to the general statement that no rendering of any of these plays has yet been made which is calculated to win those readers who do not delve in the Transactions of learned societies nor read transliterated texts in weighty volumes, but who, nevertheless, delight in the great literatures of the world.
One of the reasons for this is certainly the extreme remoteness of the subject from everything to which we are accustomed, and the difficulty of translating into our own the obscure language of these mediæval texts.
All students of Japanese are agreed about the excessive difficulty of making any rendering from the _utai_ which combines fidelity to the original with lucidity in a European language.