Kokinshu #353
Monday, 21 January 2013 07:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer (for the same celebration)
Although I don't know
whether or not it existed
in an ancient time,
the custom of a thousand
years shall begin with my lord.
inishie ni
ariki arazu-ba
shiranedomo
chitose no tameshi
kimi ni hajimemu
---L.
Although I don't know
whether or not it existed
in an ancient time,
the custom of a thousand
years shall begin with my lord.
—20 January 2013
Original by Sosei. (Okay, back in the saddle -- even if it isn't the best translation in the world, time to move on.) Omitted word: "living" for those thousand years, which I left understood. Technically, the "whether or not" has mixed tenses, with the positive part conjugated in a past tense and the negative in the present, giving the poem an interesting past/present/future construction; a literally rendering sounds very odd in English, however, and the phrase in any case the idiom was understood as entirely past.inishie ni
ariki arazu-ba
shiranedomo
chitose no tameshi
kimi ni hajimemu
---L.