Kokinshu #635

Thursday, 7 January 2010 07:30
lnhammer: the Chinese character for poetry, red on white background (Default)
[personal profile] lnhammer
    Autumn nights are long,
I now know, in name only,
    for when we do meet
by the time we even speak
it is all too quickly dawn.

—2-6 January 2010

Original by Ono no Komachi, being damned hard to translate as usual -- shifting shoals of syntax ahoy, when you sail her rivers. I can follow the general current here, but the exact channel is hard to map; this is my best understanding, which is probably too painfully literal to be truly accurate. "Long" is another of those interpolations supplied by commentary, without which you can't understand what's going on.


aki no yo mo
na nomi narikeri
au to ieba
koto zo tomo naku
akenuru mono o



As for this alternate version in contemporary teengirlspeak:

"It's, like, so not true
that nights are getting longer,
'cause we'd just hooked up
and were all, woah, when like -- woah --
it was all dawn already. Jeeze!"

you should probably forget you ever saw it -- I am, if not going to hell, almost certainly spending extra time in purgatory because of it. Say "hi" when you ascend past me.

---L.

Date: 10 January 2010 01:38 (UTC)
pameladlloyd: Alya, an original character by Ian L. Powell (Alya)
From: [personal profile] pameladlloyd
Yes, definitely spending extra time in purgatory. Lol!

About

Warning: contents contain line-breaks.

As language practice, I like to translate poetry. My current project is Chinese, with practice focused on Tang Dynasty poetry. Previously this was classical Japanese, most recently working through the Kokinshu anthology (archived here). Suggestions, corrections, and questions always welcome.

There's also original pomes in the journal archives.

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