Rather in the way that Bunting chanced upon Firdosi's Shahnameh on the quayside of Genoa, he had come across Marcello Muccioli's Italian translation of Kamo-no-Chomei's Hojoki. Bunting's ten-page poem is a strategic redaction of the Italian's translation of twenty pages of thirteenth-century Japanese prose. The sonatas discussed in the last chapter reveal in various ways how the poet habitually moves between literary and linguistic cultures, weaving segments of the precursor texts into English, sometimes in a colloquial manner and sometimes creating an idiom which is intriguingly poised between the original language and a contemporary rendering. Villon and Dante loosen the chords of Bunting's poetic voice and now Chomei, via Muccioli's Italian prose, has a similarly facilitating effect. The act of translation is never reduced to some crimping philological exercise in verbal ‘accuracy which leaves behind a lifeless corpse; rather it seeks both distillation and the creation of an atmosphere out of which the new work emerges. The latter leans on the original but is not without its new-won independence. Suter argues, in fact, that Chomei ‘stands entirely on its own. The reader need have no acquaintance with its source […] which is entirely assimilated into both the design and subject matter.’ Bunting, like Pound, has an ear for cadence and was never short of intuition and what might be described as poetic instinct. There is, in Bunting's translations, an observable sympathy between poet and subject. Just as Bunting readily identifies with Villon, we can see how in Chomei at Toyama the English poet warms to that ‘simpatico old Jap’ (PS 62).

That ‘simpatico old Jap’ served at the court of the Emperor Go-Toba. Bunting notes that Kamo-no-Chomei (1154-1216) ‘belonged to the minor nobility of Japan and held various offices in the civil service. He applied for a fat job in a Shinto temple, was turned down, and next day announced his conversion to Buddhism […] He retired from public life to a kind of mixture of hermitage and country cottage at Toyama on Mount Hino and there, when he was getting old, he wrote the Ho-Jo-Ki in prose, of which my poem is in the main a condensation’ (CP 227). Chomei's renunciation of the world is considered a high point in the zuihitsu literary tradition (PBB 135).