Comments on: Lost in translation...because I cannot read hiragana.

Question: Lost in translation...because I cannot read hiragana.

jeanmari — Sun, 27 May 2007 09:43:03 -0800

I have had some interesting works of art in my possession for four years. They have what appears to be writing on them in Japanese characters and I'm extremely interested in knowing what they say. As fate would have it,

I do not read Japanese. I've been researching these characters but cannot seem to find a plausible translation.

Item Number 1 (here and here) - A watercolor painting from the 1930's perhaps? It was purchased in the '30s...maybe 1937. Appears to be hiragana?

Item Number 2 (here) - A bronze elephant. I do not know the origin. Also purchased on the same trip, we believe. Appears to be katakana?

Every day that I walk into my office and see these, I obsess about them. They are driving me mad!!! Help?

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 10:19:04 -0800

I don't read Japanese, but I do read Chinese. The larger characters of you jprint2 read "vh��" which would be something like "Picture of pottery being fired in a kiln." (vh = pottery, ceramic ware; � kiln; � directional or verbal complement 'to emerge', 'come out' etc. I'm assigning it a grammatical function here; = picture, diagram.)
I can read the characters in the other pictures too (well, most of them in the second pic), but not having the grammar/culture won't have a stab at a meaning unless no-one who knows better shows up, but I should imagine I'm not far off with that picture caption.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 10:21:36 -0800

What with the wee chubby chap with the large pot and everything :D

By: Heywood Mogroot

Heywood Mogroot — Sun, 27 May 2007 11:15:23 -0800

the elephant mark needs to be rotated 90 clockwise . . . and it is Chinese.

The top character is 'one', the bottom is not Japanese at all, but Chinese-only.

The scroll thingy you have is in fact Japanese kanji/hiragana: starts with 'fire', then ho-te-ri-no-ma-ta-(su?)-ru-??-ya-??-no-??

(the ?? being calligraphic kanji I can't read)

ho-te-ri -- {f� -- means 'heat'/'glow'.

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Sun, 27 May 2007 11:30:38 -0800

The scroll thingy needs to be much bigger before it will be readable (at least by me).

If Abeizer is correct on the kanji, (some of them look odd to me but most handwritten stuff looks odd to me..), the squiggly line after � is W for �W from �Y (to take out, to get out). So yeah, "taking pottery out of the kiln picture". The stuff in the bottom right is to small to read, but probably the painters name.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 11:40:51 -0800

Heywood - I thought the charcaters on the elephant were "I" which is a year-mark isn't it?
The bit at the lower right of the pottery pic I thought might not be a name. The characters are XH (could be wrong about the ) which I presumed would be something about the edition - "a printing by the Tangerine Press" or some such, but again, don't know enough about Japanese to say whether that could actually be a name or whatever.

By: jeanmari

jeanmari — Sun, 27 May 2007 11:44:53 -0800

Heywood Mogroot--Thank you for the clarification. I rotated the picture. This may explain why I am getting nowhere fast on these translations.

Abiezer--Yes, it does seem that the whole picture is of something being fired in a kiln :) I zoomed in on the characters in order to make them clear, so here is the entire picture with the characters in context. (Chubby guy and all.) Thanks for your attempts so far! I'm feeling better already :)

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 11:47:02 -0800

Google seems to indicate I can be read Ikko (there's a modern company with that name). So maybe a maker's name instead? <---making it up as I go along.

By: jeanmari

jeanmari — Sun, 27 May 2007 11:56:42 -0800

Hmm. There was a Japanese netsuke carver named Ikko. But I can't seem to find a connection between Ikko and a bronze casting like this one. Interesting.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 11:58:20 -0800

That is a lovely print.
I am fairly confident that the second character is h "vessel," even though it does look different from most modern Chinese print fonts (the usual � replaced by �). I've seen it written similarly a number of times iirc.
On preview: a bronze copy of an Ikko netsuke?

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 12:00:05 -0800

Oh hang on, those were those sword hilt thingies. Ignore me. But a copy of his famous elephants carvings? (I was thinking they were those belt clasps)

By: armage

armage — Sun, 27 May 2007 13:50:31 -0800

In this picture, the rightmost two characters are "vP", with the character P being the older form of h. It means "pottery." The left three characters are "��W", which means to take a pot out of the kiln.

The three characters at the bottom are Kand H. H means "edition" or "version," but I have never heard of the other two characters being used together like that. The smaller characters to the left say h and then a character that is too small to be legible.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 13:52:07 -0800

A bit of further googling around suggests X can be read Tachibana. There was a Tachibana Minko who made prints of craftspeople at work; H can mean print.
It may be a modern line reproduction of a famous print by this Tachibana.
Also realised what nonsense I was burbling about netsuke!

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 13:56:48 -0800

Mind I got the reading of X as Tachibana off a Chinese Wikipedia entry about a yakuza society, and can't find the artist's name written in characters, so could be unconnected, but quite liked the circumstantial connection that it led to.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 14:03:41 -0800

The book was called Saiga shokunin burui apparently.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 14:24:58 -0800

Erk. Still more fun with Google says X is read Tachibana on its own and can be a surname; the artist's name was X�_ and the book of prints was called i;w��^, something like "Coloured pictures of various types of artisans."

By: Heywood Mogroot

Heywood Mogroot — Sun, 27 May 2007 16:48:11 -0800

The mark on the bronze is similar to I but not identical. More of an Y or � thing going on underneath the kanmuri of I. But I only know the post-war character set so this could be a pre-war form, though none of my references list this.

By: armage

armage — Sun, 27 May 2007 18:16:01 -0800

Abiezer is right, the character is X (tachibana), not K (hashi). Unfortunately, I don't have any further knowledge of this kind of artwork so I can't be much more help.

I'm fairly certain that the character in the bronze is not Japanese, because I have never seen I written like that, pre- or post-war. Obviously I can't say with 100% certainly, but my inclination is to say that it is Chinese.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 20:34:07 -0800

My thought with the I is that I had seen that odd variant of the two lower strokes and that it might be in part because it's easier to cut into the bronze. You certainly see the same variant in �, for example.
Only references to the combination together in Chinese I could find were as a dharma name of a monk; I still think it's either a Japanese maker's name or possibly a year mark. Will poke around a bit more.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Sun, 27 May 2007 21:00:23 -0800

Here's a netsuke by Ikko; the photo of the signature looks similar, so I'd say bronze repro is yer man.

By: derMax

derMax — Mon, 28 May 2007 03:45:45 -0800

The writing within the print says "Touki kamadashi" (vh��W - taking pottery out of a kiln. Then there is something that looks like the chop of the printmaker or artist (in the square). The bottom part says "tachibanakai ban(or han)"XH, then in the rounded square "tomi ga" (h; which seems to indicate that Tachibanakai (whatever that is) made the print and someone called Tomi is the original artist (maybe the one who did the original drawing?)

The part on the left start with "Hi hoteri no" k{f�n - "the heat radiating from the fire"...then I can't make out the rest, but it looks like a haiku about firing pottery, which sort of fits.

The other one looks, as Abelizer said, like the chop of an artist called Ikkou. The way it's written is entirely consistent with the way kanji characters were formed (and continue to be formed) for things like chops or in calligraphy in Japan so there's no indication that it's Chinese, though if you showed the whole elephant it might be a bit easier to judge that.

If you really want to make sure of what they are, take them to an antique or fine arts expert who specializes in Japanese objects.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Mon, 28 May 2007 03:53:31 -0800

derMax - that's definitely the character (see my first of many posts :D) to the left of vh��W, or I'm a non-Japanese speaker. Oh, hang on. But pounds to pennies it is.

By: No-sword

No-sword — Mon, 28 May 2007 08:33:12 -0800

I think the verse is:

r{f�n~`B��n

"The kiln still warm on a frosty morning." (Poeticize to taste.) I should probably admit though that � (kiln) is really just an educated guess, based on context and scansion as much as anything else.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Mon, 28 May 2007 08:48:55 -0800

Now we're getting warm!

By: jeanmari

jeanmari — Mon, 28 May 2007 13:21:45 -0800

This is getting exciting everyone! I'm going to try to get a larger scan of the print and here is a photo of the whole elephant, which looks more Japanese in form (to me) than Chinese. But really, I know very little about Asian art.

By: derMax

derMax — Tue, 29 May 2007 12:05:09 -0800

That elephant does indeed look like the very realistic statuary created by Japanese artists in the late 19th-early 20th century.

(we watch way too much Antiques Roadshow and such in our house)

No-sword's reading of the haiku looks good to me!