Friday, 17 December 2010

lnhammer: the Chinese character for poetry, red on white background (Default)
Written on plum flowers plucked and sent to someone.

    Yet if not to you,
then to whom might I show it?
    The flowering plum!
Only the knowing can know
both its color and its scent.

—23 October 2010

Original by Ki no Tomonori. A frequently anthologized poem, not to mention quoted in The Tale of Genji. In Japanese esthetics, "knowing" something's color is to apprehend its surface beauty, while "knowing" its scent implies a deeper insight into its true nature. (This seems to lie behind the idiom of color-and-scent meaning loveliness mentioned in #37.) I'd translate shiru hito ("person who knows") less literally as something like "the cognoscente" if the repetition of shiru ("know") didn't seem important. Again, an unmarked-and-ambiguous flower, though in this case someone else is being explicitly addressed, so here can be only exclamation or possibly a genitive possessing the color and scent.


kimi narade
tare ni ka misemu
ume no hana
iro o mo ka o mo
shiru hito zo shiru


---L.

About

Warning: contents contain line-breaks.

As language practice, I like to translate poetry. My current project is Chinese, with practice focused on Tang Dynasty poetry. Previously this was classical Japanese, most recently working through the Kokinshu anthology (archived here). Suggestions, corrections, and questions always welcome.

There's also original pomes in the journal archives.

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