James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Showing Off My Japanese With Pork Cutlets

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Created on Wednesday, 19 October 2011 06:21

Written by James Cahill

Showing Off My Japanese With Pork Cutlets

My previous blog ended with a demonstration of my old mastery (limited but nonetheless a source of pride) of literary Japanese, offering one stanza from my translation of The Walrus and the Carpenter into rhyming Japanese in the original meter. (Readers of my Reminiscences may recall that at that moment when my career in Chinese art history was launched--just as I was receiving my Bachelor’s degree at U.C. Berkeley and wondering what to do next, and Ed Schafer showed me a notice of a fellowship in Chinese painting--at that moment my real inclination was to continue with the study of Japanese literature and become a translator, doing for Heike Monogatari what Waley had done for Genji. By now, there are five English versions of Heike, one by Helen McCullough of our Oriental Languages Dept., but at that time there was only one, not very good.) In quoting this stanza of my translation, I didn’t stop to explain why Japanese poetry doesn’t use rhymes, and why writing rhyming Japanese is both easy and pointless--too many rhymes, no fun. This blog will continue with showing off my Japanese, this time with pork cutlets.

Wait, don’t go away: really. This morning’s NYTimes has a Dining section, with a piece by their cooking columnist Melissa Clark on her discovery of the kind of Japanese pork cutlets called tonkatsu, titled “Port Cutlets With the Wisdom of Two Continents”--it ends with a recipe for making them. That in itself doesn’t interest me--I have lost any desire for serious eating in my old age. But the word tonkatsu revived old memories, which will make up the rest of this blog. (And no, you don’t have to know Japanese to enjoy what follows, as I hope you will.)

A special interest of mine, derived somewhat from Boodberg’s great teaching about loan words taken from one language into another, was how the Japanese pronounced and transcribed words they borrowed from European languages on one hand, and from Chinese on the other. Many words now common came into their language that way from the West in the Meiji period and after, when Japan was opening enthusiastically to the outside world. Their own language in its original form is phonetically simple--made up of open syllables, consonant plus vowel, only five of the latter (a, i. o. e. u), no final consonants except n. And they liked to combine halves of borrowed words to make new words. Thus modern girl and modern boy became moodan gaaru and moodan booi, shortened to moga and mobo . Building became birudengu, shortened to biru--one can see, engraved in the stone bases of big buildings in Tokyo, the name something-biru. And, a special favorite of mine: when strolling in the night-life quarters of Osaka during their flourishing hours one would see signs advertising an arusaro: a place employing as hostesses girls who were not professionals but part-time amateurs--aru shortened from arubaito, from the German Arbeit, part-time work--many Japanese academic words were taken from German, since their higher educaton system was originally modeled on the German--and saro from saron, the French salon. So, an establishment where the girls (supposedly) worked part-time while pursuing higher education. (And if you believed that, you thoroughly deserved to have your money taken, as it would be.)

I remember, way back, my student Elizabeth Fulder while in Japan calling my attention to the charming Japanese word for custard, which is purin. You can find it as that on Japanese restaurant menus. It must have been an early rendering of English pudding, but is used only for custard--other kinds are called by a longer rendering, puddengu, as in chokkoretto puddengu, chocolate pudding. Purin, short and loveable, works because the Japanese pronounce their r’s as the (linguist’s) flap-r, tongue briefly against the upper palate, as distinct from the r pronounced with both lips almost coming together. Try saying it: purin, and think of a cup or dish of good custard, caramel on top.

The recipe by the NYTimes woman includes the herb shisoo (English perilla), a favorite of mine--its taste calls up memories like Proust’s cookie dipped in tea. When, during a sabbatical year in the early 1980s, we briefly rented a house in Tsukaguchi, between Osaka and Kobe, it was growing in the garden. It is used to flavor the cucumber base in my favorite Japanese pickle, the red-purple shibazuke , for which the Yase-Ohara region north of Kyoto is famous. (I must try to find some here.)

Continuing with the pork cutlets (you were waiting?): I used to speculate about how that word tonkatsu originated. The ton must be the on-yomi or Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word for pig--the kun-yomi or Japanese pronunciation is buta--the simple word for pork in Japanese is buta-niku, pig-meat. The katsu must come from an old transcription of cutlet as katsu-retsu (remember that Japanese syllables cannot end in consonants, they have to add a vowel, usually u). And so we get tonkatsu. These used to be among my favorite things to eat in Japanese restaurants. Ask for them when you next go to one. (Special plug: when in Berkeley try Noriko no ko,  the tiny place in the brick-front building on                                                                                                                                 Telegraph Ave. south of Dwight Way , the same building that has an Ethiopian restaurant where you are supposed to eat with your fingers, a good Korean restaurant, and the very old, positively ancient, Fondu Fred’s. Noriko-no-ko has from the beginning been run by a Japanese couple, the man a cook, the woman (Noriko) the hostess. A specialty of theirs is robata-yaki: beef, shrimp, and vegetables grilled and served in a special way. Unsolicited recommendation. I have been going there from the time they first opened, and am a favorite customer)

More or less across the street from there, on Telegraph just past Dwight, east side of street, there was once a Japanese restaurant, first in Berkeley I think (before that we had to go to San Francisco for one, on one of those streets above Chinatown.) This one opened while I was an undergraduate student studying, among other things, literary Japanese; and among its attractions was a charming Japanese waitress. Their offerings included various kinds of domburi--a simple lunchtime dish made by cooking something, putting rice on top, turning it all over into a bowl so that the juices from the cooked part trickle down and flavor the rice. (Domburi is a Japanese word, and is written with a Japanese-only character, the character for well, like the tic-tac-toe design with horizontals and verticals crossing, with a dot in the middle. If you ask a Japanese why it’s written that way, he tells you: if you drop a stone into a well, the sound it makes is: DOMburi!) Different kinds of domburi, which are on the menus of most Japanese small lunch restaurants, include tempura-domburi (tempura over rice), unagi-donburi (eel over rice, my favorite), and oyako-domburi, literally parent-and-child domburi, When I asked the attractive waitress about that, she explained: because it’s made with chicken and egg, parent and child. I was so charmed by this explanation, and by her, that I composed a tanka--the old classical Japanese verse form, made up of five lines of 5 -7-5-7-7 syllables (the better-known haiku is derived from this, meaning “opening verse” and                                                                                                                                          shortened to the first three lines, 5-7-5.) I composed a tanka in old literary language and inscribed it on my chopsticks wrapper to leave for her. It went:

Ono ga ko wo

Mamori-ezareba

Donburi ni

Shitagaete iku

Niwatori no haha

Meaning: the poor mother chicken who, unable to protect her child, follows it into the domburi. Whether this is really, as I intended at the time (based on what I was studying just then) in good Heian poetic style, someone else with better Japanese will have to judge.

So, that’s all for this one. If only I could go out now for some pork cutlets                                                                                                                                                                                                                     --or even a good custard. But alas, no, so off to bed.

James Cahill

who cannot resist adding (this is really the end): You will also find on the lunchroom menus ta’nin domburi, Other Guy (or Outsider) domburi,                                                                                                     in which the chicken is replaced by--can you guess? Beef. Oh, I love the Japanese language!

Rhymes Blog

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Created on Wednesday, 12 October 2011 17:12

Written by James Cahill

Rhymes blog

This one is partly at least about rhymes. In a long-ago blog I asked readers: What rhymes with ice-water? And I promised a prize of some kind for the first to respond. A long while elapsed before anyone did; and then I received this:

Comments:

what rhymes with ice-water

fly swatter?

here's one for you - why do you never see a square silo?

I responded:

Dear Other JC,

Congratulations—you are only the second [I can’t recall who the first was] in quite a few months to come up with the rhyme.

Why do you never see a square silo? I don’t know the answer to that one. If it were a real question I would try something like: because the grain sticks in the corners, but I assume it’s a riddle with a funny answer. I give up: tell me.

Best, JC

I never got a response. Now I want to make a comment about rhymes.

Today’s NYTimes Book Review section, under the notes on new books, reports a new one in the series by Laurie R. King, who writes entertaining mystery novels in two series, one about a lesbian policewoman in San Francisco, the other about a young woman detective named Mary Russell and her aged (but still active) husband Sherlock Holmes. I have read quite a few, maybe most, of both series and enjoy them. Now she has written a new book for the Russell-Holmes series titled Pirate King, in which Russell works with a film crew engaged in making a silent movie after Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Moreover, it goes on, she has composed new words for the Major General’s song in that operetta. And it quotes four lines: “I’m very good at DNA, a whiz at dactylology/, I know the scientific use of -ology and -otomy,/ In short in matters novelistic, short storied and filmical,/I am the very model of a modern major criminal.”

This is shocking--both that King could have written these lines and that the NYTimes critic could have quoted them with evident approval. How could a writer who catches so well the speech patterns of Sherlock Holmes, as they were devised by Conan Doyle a century ago, have such a tin ear for rhymes as to think that dactylology rhymes with -otomy, and filmical with criminal? This is missing the whole point of Gilbert’s genius. As one who has done a lot of writing new words for G&S songs (see, under CYCTIE on my website, my songs for Dan Destry’s Dilemma, or Publish or Perish, or Both), I am deeply shocked.

My boys Julian and Benedict, when they were still third-graders going to the nearby Southlands Elementary School and coming home for lunch every day, once brought home sheets of paper their teacher had given them (and presumably read from in class) with the first stanza of the Major General’s Song. I handed these back to them and sang this first stanza from memory, greatly impressing them. (Later we watched a DVD of the operetta and heard a real professional sing this.) There was nothing unusual, in old days, about literate and literary people having memorized G&S songs. Some of us going to the annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies would receive in advance, from (blank--Chinese history professor at a major East Coast college--Ezra Vogel?), a notice of when the G&S group would meet--one evening when there was nothing much of interest going on we would gather in some room or hallway of the hotel where there was a piano, bringing bottles of whiskey and (some of us) G&S songbooks. (I remember talking there with, for instance, Stephen Owen of Harvard, and David Keightley was a regular.) But the true afficionadoes would need no songbook, but simply stare off into space and sing, even when the song was not one of the familiar ones. Those were the days.

My close friend Stephen Green (see my Reminiscence no. 80) was a demon memorizer--he could recite Tang poems (in Chinese) endlessly, or the entire Hunting of the Snark.  When he and I worked as freshmen in the U.C. Berkeley Library as book shelvers, we spent much of our hours while doing this mindless job memorizing verses and songs. Stephen, who later was fluent in Japanese as well as Chinese, taught me to sing the first stanza of “The Bus Girls’ Song” as sung by Takamine Hideko in one of her old movies--I can still sing it. (Ask me to some time.)

(Aside: why is it that the ability to memorize is lost in one’s later years? I cannot hold much of anything new in my head for very long these days. Recently I thought I would learn the opening quatrains of Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” (I memorized the final stanza, beginning “Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes,” long ago.) Much trying, and keeping them on my computer screen for daily reading, proved useless; I can begin, “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,” but break down in what follows. Similarly with other recent attempts at memorization.)

I never memorized Hunting of the Snark myself, but did commit The Walrus and the Carpenter to memory, and have recited it numerous times, for my children (both generations) and others, recently for instance for a party organized by Sarah at the Inverness house, after the guests, by her arrangement (well-brought-up daughter that she is), had read successive stanzas of Hunting of the Snark from a book passed around. And in 1942, when my group of newly-arrived Japanese language officers were awaiting assignment for several months in Tokyo, and told to practice our Japanese (we sat at desks with dictionaries in a big room in the Marunouchi Building), I spent some of the time doing a translation of The Walrus and the Carpenter into rhyming Japanese in the original meter. This was later to endear me, as a young Oriental Languages student, to Prof. Denzel Carr and his new wife Betty McKinnon when I took a class in old literary Japanese from him. My original manuscript, written on pieces of Army-issue scratch paper, has been lost, and I remember only a single stanza: (long marks over vowels eliminated, I can’t type them in):

Kaizo to Daiku, futari de,

Sanpo shite ita;

Kaizo wa, “Kono hama ga

Suna-darake da!

Soji shitara, donna ni

Kirei desho ka na!”

That will be appreciated only by readers of Japanese, and not by many of them, I expect. All the rest is lost forever--a huge and irretrievable loss to international culture. And (to answer one of the Walrus’s questions) pigs can fly.

Yours for more verse memorization and translation,

James Cahill (9/25/11)

Blog 9/11

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Created on Tuesday, 27 September 2011 04:54

Written by James Cahill

Blog 9/11

Since writing the previous blog I have spent nearly two months in Berkeley and in Inverness, across the Bay in Marin County, where my daughter Sarah and her family rent an old house for a time every summer--a great place high up among the trees, with easy access to beaches and all the other glories of that great Point Reyes peninsula. I had a few physical and health problems, but am pretty much OK now, and back in Vancouver working away again at the video-lecture series, seeing my boys Julian and Benedict sometimes (we spent one of our evenings together a few nights ago), working on various projects in my old study.

Before going on to other matters, let me list publications of my writings, or writings about me, that have appeared or will soon appear, for those interested:

- An old article that has somehow gone unpublished, “Xieyi in the Zhe School? Some Thoughts on the Huai-an Tomb Paintings,” will appear in the next issue of Archives of Asian Art. This is through the kindness of Jerome Silbergeld, who arranged for its publication. It addresses big issues in Chinese painting studies that have not much occupied recent scholarship, but which I think are still important, mainly the relationship between the artist’s socio-economic position and the kinds of paintings he did. (My first volley about that, directed at disbelieving colleagues at a symposium in 1976, was the paper on “Tang Yin and Wen Zhengming as Artist Types.”)

- An article on the “Train Scroll” that Bill Lewis and I produced as a birthday present for Max Loehr in 1952, is in the latest (September 2011) issue of Orientations. It was written by J. P. Park, with some help from me. I think you will find this one amusing, both the article and (even more) the pictures. (The News page also offers a photo of Howard Rogers and myself, as white-haired old people, sitting on the outside deck of the Inverness house, along with a congratulatory note for my 85^th birthday.)

- The Acceptance Speech that I gave at the Freer Gallery last November when I was presented with the Freer Medal will appear in the forthcoming issue of Ars Orientalis. I mean also to issue this as one of my video-lectures, as a Postlude to the present Pure and Remote series. But in that, besides having all the images I used in my speech, there will be an Added Note with somewhat sensational revelations.

- Sanlian Book Co. in Beijing, which publishes Chinese editions of four of my books (Hills, Parting, Distant Mts., Compelling Image) and sells these in big numbers, is about to publish a Chinese edition of Painter’s Practice, which I hope will have a similarly large sale among my surprisingly big Chinese following. They also mean to publish my recent Pictures for Use and Pleasure in Chinese translation, and a picture-book on Chinese garden paintings that I have co-authored with two young Chinese--my part of the book is mostly old writings newly translated, theirs is entirely new.

- An anthology of my shorter writings in Chinese translation, long in preparation, is finally nearing publication by the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, with new Prefaces by three of their professors: Fan Jingzhong, Cao Yiqiang, and Hong Zaixin. (These three prefaces have just been published also in the 2011/2 issue of their journal Xin Meishu.)

- My article on "Visual, Verbal, and Global (?): Some Observations on Chinese Painting Studies,” which appears as CLP 176 on my website, will appear in Chinese translation in the forthcoming issue of Renmin University’s journal World Sinology. This is, for me, a particularly welcome event, because I want my ideas about the value of a visual approach to works of art, in addition to the “verbal” approach more commonly taught and practiced in China, to be more widely understood and more influential.

- My video-lectures on early Chinese painting, A Pure and Remote View, have been posted online only through Lecture 8B, on Literati Painting of Late Northern Song. But Lectures 9ABC on Southern Song Academy painting, and 10AB on bird-and-flower painting through Song, have long been finished and should go up soon, to be followed before long with the 11s (on Ma Yuan, Xia Gui, Ma Lin, and Liang Kai) and the 12s (on Jin painting and Chan painting). And before too long, d.v., a new series titled Gazing Into the Past will begin to appear--quite a few lectures in it are already planned, and several are more or less finished. Tell your Chinese friends: since Youtube is not accessible in China, the lectures can be viewed on a website called Tudou (Potato): go to http://www.tudou.com/playlist/id12470915.html

Other websites in China and Taiwan are devoted to these lectures and to commentary on my writings etc.--in effect, Gao Juhan fan clubs. How gratifying this is for an old scholar-teacher!

Finally: at the end of two previous blogs I printed old poems, written while I was a language officer in Korea in the 1940s, titled “Three Korean Street Scenes.” Here is the third of them:

III. Untitled

All along the streets of Seoul

Youths with twisted faces loll

Glaring at the passers-by

With bitter hatred in their eye

(So this is Korea, thinks Mrs. J.

Who got off the boat just yesterday

Beside the Bon Chung, on the ground

A boy in tattered clothing sits

Selling tubes of ointment found

In Army prophylactic kits

(How terribly sordid, thinks Major B.

As he walks with his wife and progeny)

Into his cart an old man bails

Brown liquid out of wooden pails

The smells of human ordure rise

Attracting myriads of flies

(How can they stand it? says Mr. L.

Crossing the street to avoid the smell)

Beside his towering firewood pack

A withered man rests on the street,

Then lifts the burden to his back

And staggers wearily to his feet

(What do they live for? asks Colonel R.

Driving by in his motor car)