'You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another...'

Natsume Soseki | In Tamil 📰

Regular readers of our blog would well remember our series on the Metaphor, in which we had discussed Natsume Soseki, a high-renowned Japanese writer, who also has claim to fame as the Father of the Modern Novel in Japan.

You may want to read more on that article on Natsume Soseki, on our past blogpost HERE!

Interestingly, in today’s Hindu Tamil Thisai, [Tamil morninger] I chanced upon an insightful review of Natsume Soseki’s Ten Night’s Dreams translated into Tamil by K. Ganeshram.

Today's Hindu Tamil Thisai, 31 July 2021

Felt so happy that I thought of taking some little time off to translate this article into English for the benefit of a wider reading public!

So here goes [select excerpts] from the article by Asai Thambi –

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened,

says Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1949 short story titled, “The Writing of the God”.

Borges is one among the rare few crop of writers who has succeeded greatly in creating fiction with dream illusions on them!

A very important forerunner even to the great Borges in making dreams into literature would be Natsume Soseki (1867 – 1916).

Soseki also happens to be Haruki Murakami’s most favourite Japanese writer.

Well, Murakami had written a novel titled, Kafka on the Shore, in the year 2002, with Kafka as its protagonist.

In this novel, Murakami acknowledges that Soseki was the favourite writer of the hero Kafka of the novel.

From then on, the entire world got interested in the works of Soseki, with renewed interest.

Well, it’s more than a hundred years since Ten Night’s Dreams was first published.

Moreover, this sequence of dream stories was written at a period in time when a Japan, rooted in its past traditions was trying hard to counter the Western cultural onslaught.

Hence, most of the stories in this dream sequence have elements of the Japanese tradition rooted firmly within their structure.

Samurai, Buddhist Monasteries, Zen concepts, Japanese calendars are some of the recurrent features that are found in these dreams.

Added, most of the times, the prose of Soseki borders on the poetic, in such simple, beautiful and compact phrasing!

K. Ganeshram’s translation has come out so beautifully well.

The success of the translator lies in the fact that, although the book has been translated from the original Japanese into English, and from English into Tamil now, the beauty and simplicity of the original has been beautifully carried forward into its Tamil version as well.

The design and the layout of the book provides a rich treat both on the visual and the reading fronts as well!

You may contact the writer at asaithambi.d@hindutamil.co.in