Kokinshu #10

[lnhammer]

Written in the beginning of spring.

    Has Spring come early
or are the flowers late?
    I would like to ask
but there's no answering call,
not even from the warbler.

—21 September 2010

Original by Fujiwara no Kotonao. He seems to have flourished at the end of the 9th century and has this single poem in the Kokinshu. This is the general sense, but to be honest, I'm guessing at how to understand those inflections of kiku, not to mention what looks to me like one mo too many. Assistance appreciated even more than usual.


haru ya toki
hana ya osoki to
kikiwakamu
uguisu dani mo
nakazu mo aru kana


ETA revision revised (see comments):

    "Has Spring come early
or are flowers late?" I ask,
    yet who might I hear?
-- there isn't a single call,
not even from the warbler.

---L.

Comments

[lnhammer]

Okay, found the solution: kikiwakamu is not a pileup of inflections, but one inflection on the compound verb kiki-waku (聞き分く), roughly, "to distinguish by hearing." With that, I've revised again, and am happier with the result.

---L.

[starlady]

Oh! Yeah, that is much nicer.

What commentaries are you using, by the way, out of curiosity?

[lnhammer]

My base text is the Japanese Text Initiative edition. In Japanese, I'm leaning the most on this online commentary and the grammatical notes in this database. (I know, I ought to have a broader range.) In English, where they cover a poem, the comments by McCullough in Brocade by Night, Cranston in A Waka Anthology, or Mostow in Pictures of the Heart are particularly helpful. The comments in the complete Kokinshu translations by McCullough and Rodd & Henkenius are less useful than one might hope.

(Repost to debork the html)
---L.