Hyakunin Isshu #54

    You won't forget me?
That one will be hard to keep
    in the days to come --
so much so I wish today
was the last day of my life.

—23 March 2010

Original by the Mother of Fujiwara no Korechika, as she is usually known, written upon her marriage to Regent Fujiwara no Michitaka. Her personal name was either Takako or Kishi, and while she was a poet of note in Chinese (even though most women were not taught the language), she left very few Japanese poems. Her daughter Sadako was the empress who employed the equally learned Sei Shonagon (#62) as lady-in-waiting. The repeat of "day" does not reflect anything in the original, but fell out as I tried to make the English idiomatic and kept because it points up the central contrast being evoked. For that matter, the negative volitional forgetting in the first line isn't marked as a quote or a question, but that seemed the best way to understand it.


wasureji no
yukusue made wa
katakereba
kyou o kagiri no
inochi to mogana

---L.