Kokinshu #164
Wednesday, 16 November 2011 07:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Written on hearing the cuckoo singing.
Although you're not me,
cuckoo, it seems you too are
continuously
crying in this world of ours
gloomy as deutzia blooms.
* OTOH, The Sadness of the Deutzia would make a pretty good title for a certain type of literary novel.
hototogisu
ware to wa nashi ni
unohana no
uki yo (no) naka ni
naki-wataruramu
---L.
Although you're not me,
cuckoo, it seems you too are
continuously
crying in this world of ours
gloomy as deutzia blooms.
—18 October, 15 November 2011
Original by Ôshikôchi no Mitsune. Deutzia is a shrub related to hydrangea with spikes of pretty white flowers in June. It's present because "of/like the deutzia" (unohana no) is a stock epithet for things described as "sad" (uki), used primarily for the sound repetition with pretty much no logical connection. Tempting as it was to interpolate some metaphoric sense, such as that the flowers are wilting or short-lived, in order to keep it from sounding completely tacked-on, as far as I can tell there really isn't any such connotation in the original.* Instead, I echoed the sonics, including the implied "too." And that's the last of the cuckoo poems -- marked not with its disappearance but, oddly, with its singing on. This is also the only/last mention of deutzia.* OTOH, The Sadness of the Deutzia would make a pretty good title for a certain type of literary novel.
hototogisu
ware to wa nashi ni
unohana no
uki yo (no) naka ni
naki-wataruramu
---L.