Kokinshu #149

[lnhammer]

(Topic unknown.)

    O cuckoo whose voice
is crying out yet whose tears
    cannot be seen --
here, the sleeves of my robe are
soaking wet: do borrow them!

—1 October 2011

(Original author unknown.) This is, of course, built by taking the "sing"/"weep" double-meaning of naku and spinning it out as something wittily over-the-top. Sleeves get soaked because that's what elegant people use to dab tears, and needing to display such elegance is an even more refined behavior -- which means we're indoors in the capital. While the speaker's ostensible generosity is admirable, this is possibly the most artificial poem so far.

(I am really coming to resent how "cuckoo" comes nowhere near close to filling a metrical line the way hototogisu does. Ah, the decisions we hobble ourselves with ... )


koe wa shite
namida wa mienu
hototogisu
waga koromode no
hitsu o karanamu

---L.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hm, I don't know that this entirely satisfies me. For the first two lines, it seems like both "voice" and "tears" are compared in terms of "existence-apprehensibility," sort of: "I hear your voice, but I don't see your tears". I feel like "cannot be seen" makes it seem like the tears are around, just not visible, whereas in reality the poet is trying to say that there are no tears. (This one is a bit YMMV, I guess.) For the last two lines, it seems to me that what the poet is trying to lend is the soaking-wetness of the sleeves (hitsu o), or (one step removed) the tears that have soaked them ("you have no tears, I have tears to spare; help yourself, man") -- not the sleeves themselves.

Just so this won't get completely nitpicky -- I like the c/c/c and then s/r/b - s/b/r sound patterns! --Matt

[lnhammer]

That first part may indeed by a YMMV;* for the second, I struggled a bit to capture what, exactly, is being borrowed -- as you say, it really is the soaking wetness (the implied nominalizer for hitsu carried by the case-marking o), but put in literal English, it sounded really odd: "the sleeves of my robe are soaking wet: do borrow that!" in the current schema. Directly offering the tears, though, would be too direct, and the whole point, it seems to me, is to be culturedly indirect. Thus my choice of offering the sleeves. This may not be defensible.

I'm pleased with the c/c/c/s/s, though I worry that the first part comes at the expense of flabby line breaks, but I confess I hadn't consciously noticed the r/b/b/r part of the pattern. Thanks.

* Though I suppose both interpretations can be encompassed with "aren't to be seen."

---L.

[lnhammer]

Er, I meant to type "the soaking wetness of the sleeves of my robe: do borrow that!"

Sheesh.

---L.