lnhammer: the Chinese character for poetry, red on white background (Default)
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    The mountain village
grows ever more desolate
    in the wintertime --
knowing that people are gone,
that the grasses have withered.

—10 February 2010

Original by Minamoto no Muneyuki. Alternate, more literal lines that sound slightly better but fail to reproduce the emphasis on winter and are metrically defective: In the mountain village / [the] wintery loneliness / grows ever deeper -- . I also struggled with the concluding non-terminal verb omoeba ("if/when/as think/feel/imagine") and its inverted word order, which treated literally gave me either banal over-explanation or Japlish of the Lady Plum-Blossom variety. So I went with bending syntax a different direction with a fragmentary appositive clause. Note, btw, the zeugmistic pivot word karenu, meaning "be far off" when the subject is people (literally, eyes of men) and "wither" when it's grass. That we all wither like the grass is, natch, the intended overtone.


yama-zato wa
fuyu zo sabishisa
masarikeru
hitome mo kusa mo
karenu to omoeba


ETA revised last two lines.

---L.

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.

April 2025

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