Kokinshu #6
Thursday, 14 October 2010 07:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammerWritten on snow fallen on a tree.
Because spring started,
does he think he sees flowers?
-- the bush warbler
singing among the branches
that are covered with white snow.
haru tateba
hana to ya miramu
shirayuki no
kakareru eda ni
uguisu zo naku
---L.
Because spring started,
does he think he sees flowers?
-- the bush warbler
singing among the branches
that are covered with white snow.
—10 September 2010
Original by Sosei, a 9th century monk whose lay name was Yoshimine no Harutoshi. A son of Henjô (who first shows up in #27), he has 36 poems in the Kokinshu. The first lines of the original, it reads as if it's the speaker that suffers from the "elegant confusion" of mistaking snow for early plum blossoms -- only when the bird is named in the last line does the probable initial subject become clear, so that the reader resolves a confusion that mirrors the bird's. English, requiring an explicit subject, can reproduce this effect only by making "see" passive, but I shudder at the thought. Shudder, I tell you. (This, even though I'm willing to be less literal for these Kokinshu translations than for the One Hundred People, having no qualms turning the independent clause "the bush warbler sings" into an appositive-with-relative-clause "the bush warbler [that is] singing" because it flows better, plus it emphasizes the bird marked with an emphatic zo.)haru tateba
hana to ya miramu
shirayuki no
kakareru eda ni
uguisu zo naku
---L.