Kokinshu #319

[lnhammer]

(Topic unknown.)

    As soon as it fell
the snow must have melted --
    the rushing sound of
the foot-weary mountain stream
is growing ever louder.

—25 September 2012

(Original author unknown.) This may be one of many examples of the "reasoning technique," but it's one of the rare sound-based ones plus has a neat antithesis between the loss of snow and increasing sound -- not to mention the implicit visual of a stream's wet-black rocks in a partly snowy landscape. More literally, it's the "sound of rushing rapids" -- I had to shuffle things to handle the stock-epithet "foot-weary" (see #59) with anything resembling grace.

Slightly more literal rendering that doesn't work as well as poetry: "The falling snow must / have immediately melted"


furu yuki wa
katsu zo kenurashi
ashibiki no
yama no tagitsu se
oto masaru nari

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Interesting contrast between foot-weariness and implied increase in momentum.

[lnhammer]

Yes -- all sorts of understatedly neat things going on in this one. (And, heh, possibly to bring that out it'd be better here to render ashibiki as "foot-dragging.")

---L.