Kokinshu #225

[lnhammer]

A poem from the poetry contest at the house of Prince Koresada.

    The white dewdrops
fallen in the autumn fields --
    might they be jewels?
The strands of spider webs have
threaded through and strung them up.

—23 March 2012

Original by Fun'ya no Asayasu, son of Yasuhide. His dates are unknown but he appears in court records in 892 and 902; this is his only poem in the Kokinshu. ¶ The version in the Hyakunin Isshu (#37) is sufficiently different (the dew-gems are wind-scattered from a broken necklace, instead of strung on becalmed spiderwebs) as to be another poem, making this a retranslation from scratch. The last two lines are technically a verbless sentence fragment, but I couldn't find a rendering that didn't sound very odd in English. In contrast with the poetic diction of the previous, this makes its poetry through a fanciful conception of concrete details. (Let it be said that I do not understand why it is nare instead of nari. I am clearly missing something about how bound forms work with final particles.)


aki no no ni
oku shiratsuyu wa
tama nare ya
tsuranuki-kakuru
kumo no itosuji

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Don't worry, "nare ya" is unintuitive enough to be listed in dictionaries. I think originally it's supposed to have been "is it because (X) (that Y)?" -- like "nareba ya" without the "ba", and sometimes also without the "Y" clause so it just means "Is it X?" I guess in this poem you can sort of torture it into meaning "Is it because the dew is jewelry? -- [that it's] strung on a spider-web". --Matt

[lnhammer]

Ah -- a missing -ba would make sense. And given /b/ and /w/ are sometimes orthographically confused, it's not hard to imagine this merging with the ya.

Hmm. Not sure this makes much difference to my translation, though. Hmm.

---L.