Kokinshu #22
Monday, 15 November 2010 07:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Composed when the emperor commanded a poem be presented.
Are the maidens
heading to pluck the young greens
on Kasuga Plain,
waving to one another
their white mulberry-cloth sleeves?
kasuga-no no
wakana tsumi ni ya
shirotae no
sode furihaete
hito no yukuramu
---L.
Are the maidens
heading to pluck the young greens
on Kasuga Plain,
waving to one another
their white mulberry-cloth sleeves?
—28 September 2010
Original by Ki no Tsurayuki. In the Kokinshu, any unspecified emperor would be Daigo, who commissioned the anthology. Shirotae no ("mulberry-cloth-white") is a pillow-word for sleeve, here used in its literal meaning instead of as just a stock epithet for flavoring. Combined with how Kasuga Plain is outside the former capital of Nara, not the Kyoto capital of Tsurayuki's day, it gives the poem a graceful, old-fashioned air. The original asks about "people", but the gathering of young greens for the festival on the seventh day of the first month was typically done by maidens. I suspect there's a bit of eroticism in those waving sleeves, given that sleeves were all that modest Heian court ladies showed in public.kasuga-no no
wakana tsumi ni ya
shirotae no
sode furihaete
hito no yukuramu
---L.
no subject
Date: 17 November 2010 05:52 (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 November 2010 14:05 (UTC)---L.