Hyakunin Isshu #30
Friday, 15 January 2010 07:35![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Since that cold parting
under a setting full moon
so indifferent
there is nothing that seems as
sorrowful as early dawn.
ariake no
tsurenaku mieshi
wakare yori
akatsuki bakari
uki mono wa nashi
---L.
under a setting full moon
so indifferent
there is nothing that seems as
sorrowful as early dawn.
—1-2 January 2010
Original by Mibu no Tadamine, long praised as one of the best poems (#625) of the Kokinshu. A couple difficulties here, the first being I don't really understand what's happening with nashi at the end, which I've tentatively treated as an odd inflection of nai ("is not"). Then there's that moon, which is not explicitly present -- however, ariake is not just dawn but specifically dawn on the 16th night of the lunar month, just after full, when the moon would be setting; here, interpretation seems preferable to repeating "dawn". And finally, uki (more commonly ui) could be anywhere in the spectrum of sad/unhappy/gloomy/melancholy/anxious/grieving; one Japanese commentary colorfully translates it as do-kororo o kurushimeru ("totally torments my heart"), which seems a bit over the top for something Teika described as full of youen, so I went with something milder.ariake no
tsurenaku mieshi
wakare yori
akatsuki bakari
uki mono wa nashi
---L.