Kokinshu #422

[lnhammer]

Bush warbler (uguisu)

    Of his own free will
he keeps soaking himself with
    drops from the flowers --
so why does this bird only cry,
"Sadly my wings never dry"?

—30 June 2013

Original by Fujiwara no Toshiyuki. Kokinshu book X, "Names of Things," is wordplay poems, most of them a game called "hidden topic" though there's also a couple acrostics. The challenge here is to work the sound of the topic word or phrase into the text of a poem without actually using the word itself. This is similar how pivot-words work, only without using the secondary meaning as part of the poem, resulting in something of a word-find puzzle. I make no attempt to replicate this in English -- just ain't gonna happen -- but I do underline the hidden topic in the romanized original (though note that in modernized texts, these may not exactly match after a millennium of pronunciation drift and spelling reforms). Sometimes the poem relates to the topic -- some, as here, even are implicit riddles the topic answers -- but much of the time the topic is irrelevant. ¶ The first group of topics are flying animals, starting with our old friend from early spring. "My wings" is omitted-but-understood: as part of courting displays, bush warblers flutter their wings while perched in trees. Sorry 'bout the rhyme, but it just fell out without trying and for once it feels appropriate for a translation. Replacing "sadly" with "oh noes" would be Too Much, though.


kokoro kara
hana no shizuku ni
sohochitsutsu
uku hizu to nomi
tori no nakuramu

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Interchangeable in the sense of supposed not to be phonemically distinct? (Requesting clarification--obviously, I have no idea.) Is what led to the introduction of the breath mark known?

Fascinating about the oblique echo word(s).

[lnhammer]

At some point, they were not phonemically distinct and then became so -- and I am not sure when, or even if it's known exactly when. What I do know is that the breath marks did not exist when the poems were written nor when the oldest manuscripts of this collection were written, meaning that they have been added by modern editors. I am familiar enough with the classical language that I can supply many of them myself, when confronted with the original spelling, but I still prefer the edited version.

---L.