Kokinshu #54

[lnhammer]

Topic unknown.

    If only there were
no waterfall down these rocks!
    -- then, cherry blossoms,
I would come pluck your flowers
for those who cannot see you.

—11 November 2010

Original author unknown. Ishibashiru ("running [over] rock") is a pillow-word/epithet for waterfalls and other kinds of rushing water, which does add to the sense of the stream being a barrier. As such, this hearkens back to the mountain setting of #50-51.


ishibashiru
taki naku mogana
sakurabana
taorite mo komu
minu hito no tame

---L.

Comments

[mme_hardy]

When you say "pillow-word" do you mean that there's also a romantic/sexual connotation? Like "wet sleeves" as a metaphor for weeping over a lover?

[lnhammer]

Er, no. Sorry. A "pillow-word" is the literal meaning of makurakotoba, which is what standard epithets were called. There were certain standard epithets for certain classes of objects, so the night, black hair, and other dark things were nubutama no, "(dark as) leopard-flower seeds" or mountains and other upland landscape were ashibiku no, meaning something like "foot-weary"(many pillow-words were old enough their etymology is obscure). Much like Athena being so frequently gray-eyed. Most of them are, like epithets in Western poetry, there for figurative flavor, and the use is more common the older the poetry -- in the Kokinshu era, they were already on their way out (though later poets would sometimes use them for allusion to old poems, or more generally for an old-fashioned flavoring).

I think the image is of a pillow on which the word in modifies rests. Almost all pillow-words are five syllables, thus filling the first or third line of a tanka.
Most of the time, I've been just translating it as epithet, but forgot to here.

---L.