Kokinshu #263

[lnhammer]

A poem from the poetry contest at the house of Prince Koresada.

    Taking umbrellas
for the rainfall -- Kasatori,
    where bright autumn leaves
set even sleeves of people
going and coming aglow.

—14-15 June 2012

Original by Mibu no Tadamine. Another name-play on kasatori = "umbrella-taking," here used as a pivot-word to create a preface that doesn't add much to the main statement aside from its cleverness. (It's possible to not read a pivot, but then the location is pointless.) Whether this is the same Kasatori as #261 is up for debate: commentaries note that while the important temple on the Kasatori that's now Daigo would explain the passing people, the identification is problematic as the name changed almost 20 years before this contest. Also problematic is the dropping of a grammatically required case-marker, making it unclear whether the bright leaves shine off the sleeves or make the sleeves themselves shine. The conceit is an interesting conception, but not Tadamine's best execution.


ame fureba
kasatoriyama no
momijiba wa
yukikau hito no
sode sae zo teru

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger]

What about the "even"---I do not quite understand "even sleeves of people coming and going" (this is an intensifying, adjective "even"); there doesn't seem to be anything to anchor it, so to speak, or to build up from. I'm not picking at your translation, it's that this is clearly in the poem or you wouldn't have it there, and I'm not getting the sense.

[lnhammer]

Heh. That's partly my fault: that's short for "even the sleeves." Or unpacked a little more "even the sleeves of those people who are coming and going" are set aglow.

What "even" attempting to render is the adverbial particle sae (which is here augmented by the emphatic particle zo), with the sense of "in addition to" (these other things) or "even" (this thing in particular) -- I went with the latter because the set being augmented is otherwise unspecified. "Not only are the woods set aglow, but even people's sleeves!"

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't actually think the case marker is missing -- "X sae zo Yu" seems like an unremarkable way of saying "Even X Ys" to me. So I think your translation works fine -- the sleeves are aglow (figuratively, I imagine), the leaves are causing it in some unspecified way.

The first line of this poem was one of those KKS first lines that makes me want to throw the book across the room and pledge allegiance to Masaoka Shiki, BUT then I read a commentary somewhere that argued that it wasn't just stupid wordplay but supposed to imply something like "It's the umbrella-taking hill, so you'd think that umbrella-taking would be involved, but even so the leaves are turning [so they must be getting wet, and therefore have failed to take an umbrella]". Which I still don't find *moving* exactly, but I have to admit I was humbled by this demonstration that I had allowed my prejudice (and shallow reading) to blind me to what the author was actually trying to do. Unless that commentary was grasping at straws that weren't really there, of course... --Matt

[lnhammer]

I still want, in that reading, a ni in the third line -- there's even room for it as momiji ni wa.

Although I hadn't put it in words quite so clear as that, that reasoning is more or less how I convinced myself that there's a pivot-word here. Without someone's umbrella, and it could be either the changing leaves' or people's, there's just no point to the whole exercise. Which is not to say that Shiki isn't right about some of the poems he kicks (including Motokata's just a few poems ago), but in this case there seems to be something more in the collection of details. I'd be happier about concluding that if Tadamine had pulled this off better.

---L.