Kokinshu #143

[lnhammer]

Written on hearing the cuckoo singing for the first time.

    When I hear once more
that first voice of the cuckoo,
    as expected
I feel again this love that
is pointlessly fixed on you.

—25 September 2011

Original by Sosei. Nushi can be read as either an honorific second-person pronoun or an indefinite pronoun ("who"). Most commentaries and translators do the latter, possibly (and this is unwarranted speculation) because a monk's love fixing on someone unknown can be interpreted as a conventional religious aspiration [ETA: or possibly because they, unlike me, correctly read the verb's inflection that makes this the easiest way to understand it]. However, "you" is a more natural reading to me, especially as the honorific sense suggests the speaker a woman, and Sosei wrote other love poems in a female persona. Not that the honorific came through in translation, any more than did that the speaker's feeling is inflected as a spontaneous action. Also, "once more" and "again" are interpretive.


hototogisu
hatsukoe kikeba
ajikinaku
nushi sadamaranu
koi seraru hata

---L.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I guess the interpretative issue is the link between "nushi" and "sadamaranu". It seems to me that they go together, so that "[nushi sadamaranu] koi" means "love (or begging?) [whose object (nushi) is unfixed (sadamaranu)]". If it's "you", you would expect some indication that "nushi" is the object, like "nushi ni" or something if that's not an anachronism. --Matt

[lnhammer]

Okay, dang it, I was making a really BASIC mistake -- two of them, in fact -- reading sadamaranu as having a perfective -nu instead of a negative -nu, even though I know perfectly well that the former would be sadamarinuru in the RTK. Correctly reading it "not fixed," then yes, the indefinite pronoun makes more sense. (With "has fixed," you can assume nushi as direct object of that verb, with a routinely dropped o.)

Back to the drafting board with this one.

---L.