Kokinshu #156

[lnhammer]

(from the same contest)

    While I consider
possibly going to bed
    of a summer night --
with a single cuckoo's voice
the first breaking light of dawn.

—7 October 2011

Original by Ki no Tsurayuki. No, wait, the cuckoo's still here -- barely. This is the first of a couple poems on the shortness of summer nights. I am intrigued by how "night" gets a genitive/locative case-marker instead of the expected topic-marking particle, which has the effect of de-emphasizing the time -- and so plays into the speaker's losing track of it.


natsu no yo no
fusu ka to sureba
hototogisu
naku hitokoe ni
akuru shinonome

---L.

Comments

[packbat]

That put a smile on my face. I've done that once or twice.

[lnhammer]

:-)

You should like the next couple poems, then.

---L.

[packbat]

Sweet!

(I also read your translation out loud to a couple people in the ASME lounge. One of them said, "He was an engineer!")

[lnhammer]

*snrk*

I did my share of all-nighters in the computer lab as an undergrad ...

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the edition I read said that "natsu no yo no" is supposed to join up with "...akuru shinonome". So if you attempted to retain the structure exactly (well, comically overexactly) I suppose it would be "The summer night's heralded-by-a-single-cuckoo's-cry-just-as-one-thinks-of-going-to-bed dawn breaking."

I think the effect is pretty much as you describe re coming unstuck in time. I'm certainly confident that there's no way I picked up on that structure on my first read-through. (Also, "sureba", sorely?) --Matt

Er, yeah, sureba -- bad transcriber, no biscuit

[lnhammer]

The attribution of yo no falls all the down to the last noun? That's ... a long way. The sort of distance that, in English, results in pronouns getting unstuck from their antecedents. Huh. I read it as applying directly to fusu, which I take to be followed by an implied nominalizer buried somewhere in its skirt of particles.

Tsurayuki may not be the greatest poet ever, but he was up there, and capable of subtle effects I can only barely appreciate. I also now think that dash is entirely too hard a stop for this poem, and should be softened to a comma.

---L.