Kokinshu #106

(Topic unknown.)

    Listen, bush warbler --
call out your reproaches
    at the blowing wind.
Has my hand even so much
as brushed against these flowers?

—26-29 June 2011

(Original author unknown.) Feel free to replace "listen" with an attention-getting exclamation appropriate for your local dialect -- so "yo" or "oy" for New Yorkers, "hwæt" for Anglo-Saxons, and so on. And may I just say that I like how in Japanese the question marker can go after what's being questioned instead of always at the end of the sentence -- here the "I" of part of "my" is marked as a rhetorical question. My translations obscure that this begins with the blowing winds that end the previous poem.


fuku kaze o
nakite uramiyo
uguisu wa
ware ya wa hana ni
te dani furetaru

---L.