Kokinshu #154

[lnhammer]

(from the same contest.)

    Is it the dark night,
or is the way confusing?
    Cuckoo, it seems you
cannot pass by, of all places,
my house -- and keep singing here.

—2 October 2011

(Original by Ki no Tomonori.) Fun-but-relevant trivia: the flexible placement of classical Japanese question mark(er)s extended even to the middle of a relative clause modifying the subject of the sentence. The syntax of the first half is almost identical to #149, but the difference of paired ?s (instead of paired contrast markers) makes it nearly impossible to make the two translations parallel without making them really awkward -- and awkward Tomonori is not. "It seems" corresponds to nothing in the original and is present only to add a graceful note.


yo ya kuraki
michi ya madoeru
hototogisu
waga yado o shimo
sugigateni naku

---L.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Are you sure those are relative clauses? I think they're just in rentaikei because of kakarimusubi from the "ya", and so your translation matches the structure of the original pretty closely.

[lnhammer]

Can two (admittedly identical, parallel) particles both bind to the same verb? Hadn't realized that sort of zeugma was possible.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

We may be talking at cross-purposes here... I see "yo ya kuraki" as one complete sentence, and then "michi ya madoeru" as another complete sentence (and I have no objection in principle to using an "or" to combine them into one in English). No need for zeugma. What's your analysis?

[lnhammer]

Oh, I see.

I was taking the parallelism of two yas as the overriding (or at least the most imporant) structure here, like two was of contrast or two kas of alternatives, and seeing both kuraki and madoeru as RTK-as-modifiers of hototogisu. In terms of binding, I was noticing only that madoeru was in the right form for it, and completely ignored that kuraki also is. Which means what I thought was fudging the translation to make better English was actually making it more accurate. Heh.

---L.