Kokinshu #199
Tuesday, 31 January 2012 07:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer (Topic unknown.)
On an autumn night
it seems it is the dew that's
especially cold --
for insects are lamenting
in each and every thicket.
aki no yo wa
tsuyu koso koto ni
samukarashi
kusamura-goto ni
mushi no wabureba
---L.
On an autumn night
it seems it is the dew that's
especially cold --
for insects are lamenting
in each and every thicket.
—16 January 2012
(Original author unknown.) I'm not entirely sure whether to understand the last clause as "because" or "when" -- I went with the former, ambiguously, because "cold" is inflected as a speculation, suggesting it's another's experience. (FWIW, if it's "when", I get: On an autumn night / it's indeed the dew that seems / especially cold / when insects are lamenting / in each and every thicket.) Either way, sentence inversion is there, where the last two lines would go first in normal sentence order -- the dash attempts to replicate the syntactic effect. Note that "lament" (waburu) again implies awareness of the naku = "call"/"weep" pun.aki no yo wa
tsuyu koso koto ni
samukarashi
kusamura-goto ni
mushi no wabureba
---L.