Hyakunin Isshu #14

    This shinobu cloth
scatter-patterned with ferns
    in Michiboku --
who has scrambled my feelings
like that? It's not my fault, so ...

—29 March 2010

Original by Minamoto no Tôru, a son of Emperor Saga who became an arbiter of taste in his generation and is a candidate for Murasaki's model for Hikaru Genji from the Tale of Genji. Double pivots ahoy: shinobu is a fern plus a dye pattern made using it as well as "to secretly long for", and some (buried in the line 4 verb) is both "to dye" and "to begin". Add an array of word associations, a metaphorical preface that's not an explicit comparison, and inverted sentence order at the end, and you've got a poem that's a challenge to translate. The version in the Kokinshu (#724) has a different fourth line from what's here and in the Tales of Ise, one that radically changes the meaning from a poem about falling in love to a protestation of faithfulness.


michinoku no
shinobu mojizuri
tare yue ni
midare-somenishi
ware naranaku ni

---L.