Larry's Pretty Good Poetry Journal

On a night he was visiting someone, he heard a cricket's chirping and wrote this.

    O cricket, no,
do not cry so terribly:
    though your sorrows are
as long as an autumn night,
my own indeed surpass them.

—11 January 2012

Original by Fuijwara no Tadafusa. Tadafusa's birth date is unknown but he first appears in court records in 893 and died in 928; he has 4 poems in the Kokinshu. ¶ Kirigirisu is another key 5-syllable noun without a case-marker, but a direct command makes it clear that here it's being addressed -- leaving instead the question of what, exactly, it is. Although today it is the name of a kind of katydid, at the time it meant a cricket, probably either a bell-cricket or pine-cricket, or sometimes generically any autumn-chirping insect. Pivot-word: nagaki is "long" for the night but also nagaki omoi, "long thought," is idiomatically "sorrow" -- the effect is an implicit comparison. Note also the return of the naku = "call" / "weep" pun. Whether the occasion was a visit to a friend or a (would-be?) lover is debated. This starts a series of insect poems, many with some sort of speaker identification; the night setting of this one matches the moon poems, by way of transitioning back to earlier in the season.

(New entry in this project's bibliography: Lafcadio Hearn's essay "Insect-Musicians" in Exotics and Retrospectives. The focus is on crickets sold as pets in Tokyo in the 1890s, but it includes a valuable rundown of the varieties and their cultural associations.)

kirigirisu
itaku na naki so
aki no yo no
nagaki omoi wa
ware zo masareru

---L.

(from the same contest)

    The eternal moon --
it is because its cassia
    also puts on
the colors of autumn leaves
that it shines ever brighter?

—9 January 2012

Original by Mibu no Tadamine. The tree is called katsura, which ordinarily refers to the Japanese redbud (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) but is also used for cassia (Cinnamomum aromaticum), the tree that in Chinese mythology grows on the moon (where a giant eternally tries to chop it down). This is confusing to almost everyone -- including apparently Tadamine, as while the temperate redbud is noted for its autumnal foliage, the tropical cassia neither is deciduous nor grows in Japan. I translated his apparent intent despite the mistaken botany, even though this makes it easier to give a negative answer.


hisakata no
tsuki no katsura mo
aki wa nao
momiji sureba ya
teri-masaruramu

---L.

(Topic unknown.)

    It seems that the night
has deepened into midnight:
    a wild goose's call
can be heard in the sky where
the moon appears overhead.

—8 January 2012

(Original author unknown.) Although the Kokinshu preface claims the editors followed the directive to collect poems not in the Man'yoshu, compiled 150 years before, this poem is also found there (IX:1701, part of a collection dubiously attributed to Kakinomoto no Hitomaro). Oops. Technically, it says the moon is seen in a sky where a goose can be heard, but reversing this maintains the image order. I went with a single goose match the loneliness of the wee small hours of the morning.


sayonaka to
yo wa fukenurashi
kari ga ne no
kikoyuru sora ni
tsuki wataru miyu

---L.

Written while people gathered in the Kannari-no-Tsubo were writing poems regretting autumn nights.

    They're detestable,
those people who'd uselessly
    sleep through until dawn
those nights that I consider
entirely precious.

—7 January 2012

Original by Ôshikôchi no Mistune. The Kannari-no-Tsubo ("thunder court") was a building in the northwest corner of the imperial compound, next to the women's quarters -- one wonders if he had a lover listening in. To make something coherent, I had to reverse the sentence order -- in the original, his delight in night come first, then the sleeping people, then his detestation. I translate oshi(mu) as "regret" in the headnote and "precious" in the poem -- no English word quite matches the range of the concept, though "dear" comes close -- and treat akasu, "to pass (time)," as something of a pun on akeru, "to dawn," (they're written with the same kanji) and double-translated it a la a pivot-word.


kaku bakari
oshi to omou yo o
itazura ni
nete akasuramu
hito sae zo uki

---L.

(Topic unknown.)

    Even though the bed
where I lie down alone
    is not made of grass,
when the autumn evening comes
it is soaked through with the dew.

—2 January 2012

(Original author unknown.) Some editions read neru instead of the archaic spelling nuru used in my base text -- both mean "lie down"/"sleep." To sleep on grass (especially a grass pillow) is a common metonymy for traveling, and we are to understand the supposed dew is probably tears -- though whether because of the season, as the poem's placement suggests, or a separation is an open question. Note the shift to considering autumnal nights.


hitori nuru
toko wa kusaba ni
aranedomo
aki kuru yoi wa
tsuyukekarikeri

---L.

(Topic unknown.)

    Even though it is
not for my sake alone that
    autumn arrives, when
I hear the sounds of insects,
it is I who sorrows first.

—2 January 2012

(Original author unknown.) This time, the contrast is explicitly with other people. The sound of insects, especially crickets chirping, is another poetic symbol of autumn. Technically, it's the existence of autumn-that-comes rather than the coming itself that is nominalized, but the effective sense is as translated -- noted not to excuse my wording so much as to express delight in the syntactic flexibility of classical Japanese.


waga tame ni
kuru aki ni shimo
aranaku ni
mushi no ne kikeba
mazu zo kanashiki

---L.

Topic unknown.

    When I see moonlight
filtering through the spaces
    between the bare trees,
I realize it has come,
the melancholy autumn.

—30 December 2011

Original author unknown. This appears in Ono no Komachi's collected poetry, but the attribution is considered doubtful as that was compiled some generations after her death. I concur with the doubt here, as it reads nothing like her other poems in anything but emotional tone. Sequencewise, now that we are over the surprise arrival of autumn, it it time to sorrow over it. Melancholy sparked by barren branches is a trope borrowed from China; Japanese poets borrowed the seasonal response but largely transferred the stimulus to the changing leaves, which are basically never mentioned in Chinese poems. That the trees here are "bare" is not in the original but implied by the gaps.


ko no ma yori
mori-kuru tsuki no
kage mireba
kokorozukushi no
aki wa kinikeri

---L.

Written at dawn on the night of the Seventh.

    Because "It is now" --
in this time of separation,
    though I haven't yet
crossed the River of Heaven,
my sleeves are already soaked.

—5 December 2011

Original by Minamoto no Muneyuki. The conceit being that the Oxherd is crying into his sleeves, getting them wet even before the river splashes them, presumably on the ferry. Technically "(it is) now" is not directly quoted, but I treat it as a farewell comparable to sayônara, lit. "since (it's) thus," to bring out the pathos. I completely failed to reproduce the soundplay of wakaru ("separate") and wataru ("cross").


ima wa tote
wakaruru toki wa
ama (no) kawa
wataranu saki ni
sode zo hichinuru

---L.

(Written the night of the Seventh.)

    These threads we offer
for Tanabata ever
    continue onward --
will their love extend like that
the length of the cord of years?

—6-16 December 2011.

(Original by Ôshikôchi no Mitsune.) On Tanabata, young women gave offerings of thread to the Weaver Maid in return for skill at working with it. As such, I understand the speaker as one of them speculating about the celestial affair, but it could be read as a single person talking about his/her own love, with the offering in third person and the festival as metaphoric dressing. The action of the middle line, uchihaete ("keeps continuing, and"), applies both to the thread above it and the years below; I made the implicit comparison explicit.


tanabata ni
kashitsuru ito no
uchi-haete
toshi no o nagaku
koi ya wataramu

---L.

A poem from the poetry contest held in the palace of the consort in the same era.

    It is cold indeed,
a heart that could promise that:
    is meeting but once
a year on Tanabata
really a meeting at all?

—15 November 2011

Original by Fujiwara no Okikaze. Back to purely earthbound speculation. I cannot help thinking this isn't really a Tanabata poem but rather using the story's trappings to accuse the speaker's lover. Either way, though, it doesn't work for me because it's blaming the victim: meeting one night a year isn't the idea of either the Weaver Maid or the Oxherd, but a punishment from her grandfather, the Emperor of Heaven, for shirking her weaving for love. "But," "really," and "at all" are rhetorical rather than literal, from the question marked as expecting a negative answer.


chigirikemu
kokoro zo tsuraki
tanabata no
toshi ni hitotabi
au wa au ka wa