Kokinshu #58
Sunday, 30 January 2011 09:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Written on a broken cherry [branch].
Who -- who in the world
sought out and broke it off?
Spring mists, didn't you
rise up and conceal them,
these cherries of the mountains?
tare shi ka mo
tomete oritsuru
harugasumi
tachi-kakusuramu
yama no sakura o
---L.
Who -- who in the world
sought out and broke it off?
Spring mists, didn't you
rise up and conceal them,
these cherries of the mountains?
—2 November 2010
Original by Ki no Tsurayuki. The cherries are back to being transient, though by a different cause. The effect of marking "who" with three emphatic particles is startling enough, I think, to warrant the idiomatic rendering. Grammatical bits: the spring mist, another unmarked 5-syllable line, can be read as addressee or subject of "rise-and-conceal," while the last three lines invert the normal sentence order, syntactically reflecting Tsurayuki's supposed outrage.tare shi ka mo
tomete oritsuru
harugasumi
tachi-kakusuramu
yama no sakura o
---L.