Kokinshu #191
Sunday, 15 January 2012 07:45![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Topic unknown.
Across the white clouds,
wings in line upon line,
wild geese are flying --
you can even count them
in this autumn night's moon.
shirokumo ni
hane uchi-kawashi
tobu kari no
kazu sae miyuru
aki no yo no tsuki
---L.
Across the white clouds,
wings in line upon line,
wild geese are flying --
you can even count them
in this autumn night's moon.
—6 January 2012
Original author unknown. The moon would the the full one of the Eighth Month, which in the lunisolar calendar fell in September or earliest October, the occasion of Tsukimi or the Moon Viewing Festival -- and of the next few poems. Sequencewise, this jumps a little ahead in time, as the geese (the same that flew north in #30) don't start arriving south for the winter in #206. Grammatically, this is a long noun-phrase headed by and describing "moon," but the order of images is more important to the effect than keeping the syntax as smooth as the original. All in all, a lovely poem, one that forced me to break form and shorten all long lines a syllable to match its grace.shirokumo ni
hane uchi-kawashi
tobu kari no
kazu sae miyuru
aki no yo no tsuki
---L.
no subject
Date: 15 January 2012 20:45 (UTC)---L.