![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Kokinshu #145
Sunday, 9 October 2011 06:43 Topic unknown.
O cuckoo who sings
in the summertime mountains,
if you have a heart,
do not make me hear your voice --
I'm already feeling so much.
natsuyama ni
naku hototogisu
kokoro araba
mono omou ware ni
koe na kikase so
---L.
O cuckoo who sings
in the summertime mountains,
if you have a heart,
do not make me hear your voice --
I'm already feeling so much.
—25 September 2011
Original author unknown. This starts a mini-arc of seven anonymous poems, most of them taking, in a trope borrowed from Chinese poetry, the cuckoo's song as an occasion for melancholy -- a mood set up by the previous two poems. As part of that arc, note here the remote location. Following SOP, the literal "think about things" is rendered idiomatically. I like how the heart is displaced from the presumably love-lorn speaker onto the bird, implicitly tying together human and nature. (A more literal last two lines would be "do not make me, already / feeling so much, hear your voice" but the line-break really, really bugged me.)natsuyama ni
naku hototogisu
kokoro araba
mono omou ware ni
koe na kikase so
---L.