Kokinshu #162
Saturday, 12 November 2011 08:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Written on hearing the cuckoo singing in the mountains.
Cuckoo, when I hear
you crying upon Mt. Pine,
where I for her pine,
I am suddenly struck by
an overwhelming longing.
* First Kokinshu use here, but there are many more to come in the love poems.
hototogisu
hito matsuyama ni
nakunareba
ware uchitsuke ni
koi masarikeri
---L.
Cuckoo, when I hear
you crying upon Mt. Pine,
where I for her pine,
I am suddenly struck by
an overwhelming longing.
—12 October 2011
Original by Ki no Tsurayuki. Mt. Pine is purely notional, an invented location used only for the pivot-word matsu = "pine tree" / "to wait" for the one he *ahem* pines for (here assumed to be a woman). I am disappointed to see Tsurayuki using that moldering chestnut* so uncreatively, even allowing for the grammatically strained possibility that the bird is singing on a pine tree. Lame "poetical" syntax reflects lame poetic pun.* First Kokinshu use here, but there are many more to come in the love poems.
hototogisu
hito matsuyama ni
nakunareba
ware uchitsuke ni
koi masarikeri
---L.