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Kokinshu #1104
Tuesday, 29 March 2011 07:04 Okinoi, Miyakojima
Even more painful
than burning one's own body
with flaring coals is
the separation between
the capital and those islands.
This is going to take some explication, starting with some textual history. All our Kokinshu manuscripts are or derive from editions prepared by Fujiwara no Teika, which he created by collating variants against a base text edited by his father. In doing so, Teika restored several poems that had been dropped or deleted over the previous three centuries, and rather than mess with the inherited sequence he tacked them onto the end with notes explaining where they had originally been. According to which, this was from book 10, following #456.
Book 10 takes a note of its own. It's devoted to a type of wordplay poems called "names of things" that was apparently much enjoyed in the 9th century but later depreciated, especially for formal contexts like imperial collections. The topic is a word (or if you're really showing off, words) that are hidden word-search-like in a poem, in the manner of "both the duck and the grebe are scared" contains bear. (So that's not the best example -- work with me here.) The poem's content may or may not have anything to do with the topic word -- a couple poems are riddles answered by the topic, but this does not seem to be common, more's the pity. In a sense, writing one was like using a pivot-word not to layer another meaning but simply for the hidden reading -- the point being to be clever, not write great poetry. The resulting poems are often weak and, even more often, seem a bit pointless in translation, given how poorly wordplay carries over between languages.
In this case, Okinoi and Miyakojima (underlined in the original text; note that without diacritical marks shi and ji were written the same) are the names of otherwise unknown places. It's easiest to read this as a speaker in the capital saying farewell to someone leaving for the islands -- in doing so, I specified "those." However, the poem also appears anonymously in Tales of Ise as by a speaker on a Miyakojima somewhere in northern Honshu talking to someone leaving for the capital. Note that whether speaker or listener is departing is also ambiguous. My sense is this is one of the better examples of the form, in that it not only glances at implications of the topic words but also works as poetry even when you don't know it's a puzzle-verse.
oki no ite
mi o yaku yori mo
kanashiki wa
miyako shimabe no
wakare narikeri
---L.
Even more painful
than burning one's own body
with flaring coals is
the separation between
the capital and those islands.
—3 January 2011
Original by Ono no Komachi.This is going to take some explication, starting with some textual history. All our Kokinshu manuscripts are or derive from editions prepared by Fujiwara no Teika, which he created by collating variants against a base text edited by his father. In doing so, Teika restored several poems that had been dropped or deleted over the previous three centuries, and rather than mess with the inherited sequence he tacked them onto the end with notes explaining where they had originally been. According to which, this was from book 10, following #456.
Book 10 takes a note of its own. It's devoted to a type of wordplay poems called "names of things" that was apparently much enjoyed in the 9th century but later depreciated, especially for formal contexts like imperial collections. The topic is a word (or if you're really showing off, words) that are hidden word-search-like in a poem, in the manner of "both the duck and the grebe are scared" contains bear. (So that's not the best example -- work with me here.) The poem's content may or may not have anything to do with the topic word -- a couple poems are riddles answered by the topic, but this does not seem to be common, more's the pity. In a sense, writing one was like using a pivot-word not to layer another meaning but simply for the hidden reading -- the point being to be clever, not write great poetry. The resulting poems are often weak and, even more often, seem a bit pointless in translation, given how poorly wordplay carries over between languages.
In this case, Okinoi and Miyakojima (underlined in the original text; note that without diacritical marks shi and ji were written the same) are the names of otherwise unknown places. It's easiest to read this as a speaker in the capital saying farewell to someone leaving for the islands -- in doing so, I specified "those." However, the poem also appears anonymously in Tales of Ise as by a speaker on a Miyakojima somewhere in northern Honshu talking to someone leaving for the capital. Note that whether speaker or listener is departing is also ambiguous. My sense is this is one of the better examples of the form, in that it not only glances at implications of the topic words but also works as poetry even when you don't know it's a puzzle-verse.
oki no ite
mi o yaku yori mo
kanashiki wa
miyako shimabe no
wakare narikeri
---L.