Luckily, this is not the only or the inevitable experience of translating poetry. Given the great difficulty of the task, the pleasure when you get it right is that much the greater –marvellous random felicities of equivalence across languages that you can happen on, or better still, a way of catching the deepest ‘sense’ of a word or line (as distinct from its dictionary meaning) so neatly that it adds new riches that the original language wasn’t capable of carrying. On good days, translating a poem can go as excitingly right as writing one can.

And in the end, despite all that can be said about the impossibly of translating poetry, it is surely better to try and fail than not to try at all. I don’t imagine anyone would argue with the idea that even a literal translation of a poem by Lorca or Basho or Pushkin, through which one can at least attempt to feel something of the original poem, is preferable to never knowing their work at all. Indeed the fact that it was anyway worth a go was more or less our only starting point when Sakai Nobuo and I first decided to undertake the challenge of translating Judith Wright’s poetry into Japanese. The end was of course unsure; some if not all of the translations might prove to simply not ‘work’, mostly for reasons to do with the vast gap between the two languages and cultures. But most certainly we would learn a great deal in the process, and if the outcome was good, so much the better.

I don’t think ‘co-translation’ of poetry is ever really possible for two people working out of the same native language. Even in translating literary prose, questions of personal style dictate the choice of words at almost every turn. A successful poem translation must necessarily be to some extent an individual re-creation of the poem. Just to what extent it should be so is of course a matter for debate (and thus potentially for argument between co-translators), but even once this question is cleared up, the final choices have to be made according to highly personal and even idiosyncratic taste, for the poem to really come alive in translation. The final translations of these poems are entirely the work of Mr Sakai. The process of translation, as distinct from its end product, was one of long and delicate negotiation between us.

We began by each separately preparing a translation of the poem, and comparing them carefully word by word. Mr Sakai’s translations were of course far superior to mine, since Japanese is not my native language. However, there were often points at which our approach to a line or a word would differ greatly, through differing responses to nuances or understandings of the original. We would spend fascinating hours working through a poem together in this way, and the result was always a more or less massive rewriting which integrated the two readings. Then we put the poem aside and went on to the next one.

Much later, Mr Sakai would return to the translation and this time work to make it come alive as a poem in Japanese. This was in fact the most difficult point in the process, as we faced the inevitability of the need for certain sacrifices of the English in order to allow the Japanese poem to come to life. There were many wranglings over just where and how to wield the knife, but interestingly, it was often precisely at these points of contention that the Japanese translation would come suddenly into a new kind of ‘true’ with the original poem. For some reason, it seems often to be the case that something which slips too glibly from one language into another remains somehow lustreless in the translation. The result of the tensions of our two differing loyalties to native languages was, I think translations which largely achieve the difficult feat of containing in intricate balance a sense of the life of both. If our approach can truly be called ‘co-translation’, then in this case co-translation seems to have worked.

The process of selecting from among our many translations the fifteen which go to make up The Flame Tree was largely dictated by the National Library’s request that we choose poems with an eye to the theme of ‘nature’, which would presumably make the book more attractive to the Japanese reading public.

This involved us in several problems, not the least of which was the question of the often vast differences between a Japanese experience of ‘nature’ and an Australian one. A poem in which egrets wade in ‘a pool, jet-black and mirror-still’ (‘Egrets’) is all very well – after all, there are white egrets and dark pools in Japan too – but what of the paperbarks which crown the pool’s edges? And what can be done about the flower of the wonga vine, or for that matter a flame tree? And of course there is the more intractable problem of translating the Australian landscape itself. A poem such as ‘Train Journey’, with its ‘small trees on their uncoloured slope/ … under the great dry flight of air’ requires a powerful act of imagination on the part of many Japanese readers. But this can after all be said equally of many British readers, for instance, and indeed eliciting this sort of imaginative leap is surely part of the point of introducing poetry across cultural and geographical divisions. In the end we could only leave the imagery to make its own way into the different imagination of its readers.

Altogether we have put together some sixty translations, over a number of years of fortnightly meetings, and the process has inevitably involved a growing sense of intimacy with both the individual poems and the poetry as a whole. As a way of really reading something, the act of translation is hard to beat. I grew up with many of these poems in a particularly intimate way, since they were written by my own mother, and are often deeply identifiable with my own experiences and memories. But I realized only quite recently that in fact I had never really read them – there was a sense in which they were always too close for me to be able to face them directly.

The process of translating them into a foreign language ‘liberated’ the poems for me in powerful ways which I could never have anticipated. For that reason, as much as for the deep pleasures and satisfactions of the translation process itself, the experience which led to this small book has been perhaps disproportionately intense.