Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!
"World how it walled about
Life with disgrace
Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face!"
Yet, bright and clean-cut though it be, this gem is clouded by metaphors which would puzzle the Japanese intellect. It would fail to grasp the meaning of "a starved bank"; it would miss the identity of "God's smile" with a human face. Personification and metaphor lie outside its limits: even the simile is rare. In the forty or fifty Dodoitsu which I have collected and translated no simile is employed, unless both branches are plainly indicated. They abound in fancy; they lack imagination. They derive their very force from this limpet-like allegiance to fact, their suggestiveness from the assurance that the quick-witted but unimaginative reader will associate one fact with others of the same order and not be misled by the vagaries of Western vision. To the Western mind, on the other hand, this association, wanting in his experience, will sometimes need explanation; at other times the meaning is crystal-clear. There are shades of significance, touches of tenderness, which escape translation because dependent on grammatical peculiarities which no European tongues possess. The personal pronoun, generally unexpressed, by its absence generalises and so humanises the passion of a lover's cry; a reticence is gained which accords well with the shrinking delicacy of a sensitive heart. When expressed, the word for "I" will connote submission, the word for "thou" lordship or lovership, by a double sense, impossible to convey. Thus, the very structure of Japanese verse,
