Hyakunin Isshu #24
Friday, 1 January 2010 09:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer I couldn't present
prayer strips for this journey
on Offering Hill
may the gods accept instead
this brocade of autumn leaves.
kono tabi wa
nusa mo toriaezu
tamukeyama
momiji no nishiki
kami no manimani
---L.
prayer strips for this journey
on Offering Hill
may the gods accept instead
this brocade of autumn leaves.
—31 December 2009
Original by Sugawara no Michizane. Although other translations don't seem to think it's ambiguous, it reads to me like the mountain where offerings are made (tamukeyama, which could be either a generic place or a specific shrine) is syntactically both where he didn't offer prayer strips and where the replacement leaves are, so I've left out punctuation to allow either reading. The occasion was a journey by a retired emperor in 898, and the poet was a high-ranking minister who clearly knew a thing or two about flattery. He was also a leading scholar of his generation who was deified as a god of calligraphy (and a patron of exam-takers). Modernized original:kono tabi wa
nusa mo toriaezu
tamukeyama
momiji no nishiki
kami no manimani
---L.