Kokinshu #353

(for the same celebration)

    Although I don't know
whether or not it existed
    in an ancient time,
the custom of a thousand
years shall begin with my lord.

—20 January 2013

Original by Sosei. (Okay, back in the saddle -- even if it isn't the best translation in the world, time to move on.) Omitted word: "living" for those thousand years, which I left understood. Technically, the "whether or not" has mixed tenses, with the positive part conjugated in a past tense and the negative in the present, giving the poem an interesting past/present/future construction; a literally rendering sounds very odd in English, however, and the phrase in any case the idiom was understood as entirely past.


inishie ni
ariki arazu-ba
shiranedomo
chitose no tameshi
kimi ni hajimemu

---L.