Kokinshu #227
Monday, 2 April 2012 07:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Written on seeing maidenflowers on Man Mountain when he was traveling to Nara to Archbishop Henjô's home.
O maidenflowers,
I do indeed gaze sadly
as I pass you by
-- for I am aware that you
are growing on Man Mountain.
BTW, an evolving style thing I haven't explicitly mentioned: a dash at the start of a line often corresponds to a disruption from ordinary syntax in the original, usually that inverted the sentence order has been (as here, where the clause ending with an "and because of this" conjunction comes after the consequence). I should go back through the first couple books and regularize this practice.
ominaeshi
ushi to mitsutsu zo
yukisuguru
otokoyama ni shi
tateri to omoeba
---L.
O maidenflowers,
I do indeed gaze sadly
as I pass you by
-- for I am aware that you
are growing on Man Mountain.
—25 March 2012
Original by Furu no Imamichi, who appears in court records between 860 and 898 holding various provincial offices, and so was probably born around 830. He has three poems in the Kokinshu ¶ Otoko (lit. "man") Mountain was on the route from the capital to Isonokami Temple near Nara, where Henjô lived for a while. The maidenflowers could also be a third-person direct object of the gazing, but the editors clearly intend us to read this as a contrast to the previous.BTW, an evolving style thing I haven't explicitly mentioned: a dash at the start of a line often corresponds to a disruption from ordinary syntax in the original, usually that inverted the sentence order has been (as here, where the clause ending with an "and because of this" conjunction comes after the consequence). I should go back through the first couple books and regularize this practice.
ominaeshi
ushi to mitsutsu zo
yukisuguru
otokoyama ni shi
tateri to omoeba
---L.