Larry's Pretty Good Poetry Journal

    In the autumn fields
blown by the gusty winds,
    the white drops of dew
scatter everywhere like pearls
from a broken necklace.

—5 February 2010

Original by Fun'ya no Asayasu. Here's a good exercise in how a topic and unstated subject can interact -- if you take the topic headword, field (no), to be subject of the main verb, scatter (chiru), you get nonsense. The implied grammatical subject is instead the white dew (shiratsuyu) from the relative clause modifying no. Not a construction that English can readily reproduce without either ugly repetition or promoting the subject out of the relative clause. Note that it's not that the dewdrops/jewels "are scattered" but rather they "scatter" -- active verb here, in contrast to the passive fukishiku -- and that the winds blow in a frequentive inflection. Neep, neep.


shiratsuyu ni
kaze no fukishiku
aki no no wa
tsuranuki tomenu
tama zo chirikeru

---L.

    In the mountain stream
the wind has built up a weir
    like those for fishing,
and not even autumn leaves
can flow past on the current.

— 31 January 2010

Original by Harumichi no Tsuraki. The last two lines are, grammatically, a bit thorny -- are the leaves the weir or caught in it? -- though it's easy to catch the drift, so to speak.


yamakawa ni
kaze no kaketaru
shigarami wa
nagare mo aenu
momiji narikeri

---L.

    Just as I set out
for Tago Bay, I look up --
    and on the pure white
of Mount Fuji's lofty peak
the snow continues to fall.

—22 January 2010

The original by Yamabe no Akahito is another famous one, this text being a revision of the version in the Man'yoshu (where it's the envoy for a choka). Could read as either "set out for" or "go out on" -- depends on whether you want him on land or sea, more or less.


tago no ura ni
uchi-idete mireba
shirotae no
fuji no takane ni
yuki wa furitsutsu

---L.

    Time after time
I see flowers from home bloom,
    so why is it
that a flower called "Mother"
never comes into bloom?

—20 January 2010

Original by Hase[tsuka]be no Mamaro, a soldier drafted in 755 for frontier duty on the north coast of Kyushu (facing Korea). He was from the Yamana district of Totomi Province (modern Shizuoka Prefecture), and so spoke an eastern dialect of Old Japanese -- which means more guessing than usual here. Normally I'd avoid repeating words, but our young (for he sounds very young) recruit repeats both flower and bloom. "I see" is my interpolation; "from home" is a plausible, or at least defensible, interpretation of "the same".


tokidoki no
hana wa saketo mo
nani sure so (or zo)
haha tou hana no
sakidekozukemu

---L.

There is no way to say I cannot speak:
the very abnegation self-negates.
Words tangle, tumbled down like wooden gates
rotting on hinges too stiff to even creak
as gusts tug through the homestead above the creek,
abandoned like the stone walls to their fates
of silence and decay and endless waits
for one more beam to break down late next week.
Yet silence, golden or consenting, will
perpetuate its cause; hushes stay hushed,
hard to hack through. Blocked off from the south,
the empty house is overgrown with brush
that blooms in spring and glories autumn still:
a way of happening, an empty mouth.

—7 March 2009

Yes, I can sometimes write things with more than 31 syllables. For your amusement, here are two outtakes from before I realized this sonnet needed to stay focused on a single image instead of jumping about progressing:

A silence can be empty: down the hall
a lounge is grieving; those who get away
find that linoleum cannot console, that all
fluorescent bulbs can do is buzz decay.

A silence can heard, the still small voice
surpassing all things: listen, and rejoice.

I hope to use these in something else some day. Especially that first, as the second is bit heavy-handed.

---L.

    With red-capped head cocked,
hop hop 'round the oak tree trunk
    but without finding
anything worth poking at,
this quick acorn woodpecker.


No toktoktok here.

---L.

    Since that cold parting
under a setting full moon
    so indifferent
there is nothing that seems as
sorrowful as early dawn.

—1-2 January 2010

Original by Mibu no Tadamine, long praised as one of the best poems (#625) of the Kokinshu. A couple difficulties here, the first being I don't really understand what's happening with nashi at the end, which I've tentatively treated as an odd inflection of nai ("is not"). Then there's that moon, which is not explicitly present -- however, ariake is not just dawn but specifically dawn on the 16th night of the lunar month, just after full, when the moon would be setting; here, interpretation seems preferable to repeating "dawn". And finally, uki (more commonly ui) could be anywhere in the spectrum of sad/unhappy/gloomy/melancholy/anxious/grieving; one Japanese commentary colorfully translates it as do-kororo o kurushimeru ("totally torments my heart"), which seems a bit over the top for something Teika described as full of youen, so I went with something milder.


ariake no
tsurenaku mieshi
wakare yori
akatsuki bakari
uki mono wa nashi

---L.

Another link instead of direct text, this one to Goblin Fruit:


Psyche, At Midnight, in the Dark

—12-17 April 2005, revised 5-7 November 2005

Yes, it really does take me that long to write and then sell things ...

---L.

    Autumn nights are long,
I now know, in name only,
    for when we do meet
by the time we even speak
it is all too quickly dawn.

—2-6 January 2010

Original by Ono no Komachi, being damned hard to translate as usual -- shifting shoals of syntax ahoy, when you sail her rivers. I can follow the general current here, but the exact channel is hard to map; this is my best understanding, which is probably too painfully literal to be truly accurate. "Long" is another of those interpolations supplied by commentary, without which you can't understand what's going on.


aki no yo mo
na nomi narikeri
au to ieba
koto zo tomo naku
akenuru mono o


As for this alternate version in contemporary teengirlspeak:

"It's, like, so not true
that nights are getting longer,
'cause we'd just hooked up
and were all, woah, when like -- woah --
it was all dawn already. Jeeze!"

you should probably forget you ever saw it -- I am, if not going to hell, almost certainly spending extra time in purgatory because of it. Say "hi" when you ascend past me.

---L.

Because this is so long, instead of posting it I'm just giving a

link to the full text.

—1-20 December 2009

This is a fanfiction to the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight written for the Yuletide 2009 gift exchange -- a "lost" episode in the same alliterative verse stanza (to order translation conventions) as the original. (Don't worry about the prose introduction, which is there as scholarly fanservice.) I wanted to examine exactly why Gawain, who above all the other knights of the Round Table has a reputation of a womanizer, is so defensive of his sexual virtue -- the only reason that made sense was that he'd already slipped. Hard. And realized it was a Big Mistake. Thus, this.

---L.