Kokinshu #463
Friday, 25 October 2013 07:03![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Katsura Palace (Katsura-no-miya)
With autumn coming,
might the cassia on the moon
be growing fruit?
-- ah, no, it's still scattering
the light like flower petals.
lnh, 21-2 oct '13.
Original by Minamoto no Hodokosu, a great-grandson of Emperor Saga who appears in court records as middling courtier between 904 and his death in 931. This is his only poem in the Kokinshu. ¶ For the problems of the katsura, see #194 -- since this is the lunar tree, here "cassia," even though unlike the redbud-like tree (see #433) the cinnamon doesn't fruit. The topical palace was a residence of a daughter of Emperor Uda. Textual issue: in the first line, my base text has aki kureba, "because autumn comes" but some textual traditions have aki kuredo, "although autumn comes" -- which reduces somewhat the irony of the rhetorical question expecting a negative answer. The point being, of course, that the plants of the eternal moon don't (or shouldn't) change. "No" and "petals" are interpretive, and for clarity in English I slightly mistranslate the final o as exclamatory instead of what is probably a conjunction meaning "even though."
aki kureba
tsuki no katsura no
mi ya wa naru
hikari o hana to
chirasu bakari o
---L.
With autumn coming,
might the cassia on the moon
be growing fruit?
-- ah, no, it's still scattering
the light like flower petals.
lnh, 21-2 oct '13.
Original by Minamoto no Hodokosu, a great-grandson of Emperor Saga who appears in court records as middling courtier between 904 and his death in 931. This is his only poem in the Kokinshu. ¶ For the problems of the katsura, see #194 -- since this is the lunar tree, here "cassia," even though unlike the redbud-like tree (see #433) the cinnamon doesn't fruit. The topical palace was a residence of a daughter of Emperor Uda. Textual issue: in the first line, my base text has aki kureba, "because autumn comes" but some textual traditions have aki kuredo, "although autumn comes" -- which reduces somewhat the irony of the rhetorical question expecting a negative answer. The point being, of course, that the plants of the eternal moon don't (or shouldn't) change. "No" and "petals" are interpretive, and for clarity in English I slightly mistranslate the final o as exclamatory instead of what is probably a conjunction meaning "even though."
aki kureba
tsuki no katsura no
mi ya wa naru
hikari o hana to
chirasu bakari o
---L.