Kokinshu #658

[lnhammer]

Topic unknown.

    Though I constantly
travel on the path of dreams,
    feet never resting,
all these visions are nothing
to a glimpse in the waking world.

—1-3 November 2010

Original by Ono no Komachi. In classical prosody, a line with an extra syllable was considered an acceptable metrical variation, especially if two adjacent vowels can be elided together (as in wa arazu). In general, this has little effect on the reading, but sometimes it gives the line a slight emphasis, especially when, as here, it's the last line. I haven't been calling out these variations as I've not been strictly matching the form (mostly by being a syllable short every so often), but in this case I managed to without straining or padding the language. As far as I can tell, though, this has no effect in English. Ah well. Hitome (here "glimpse," literally "single-eye") can also be understood as "meeting," but the diminishment makes the comparison stronger, to my ear. Also, I like how "path of dreams" is a single compound word, yumeji.


yumeji ni wa
ashi mo yasumezu
kayoedomo
utsutsu ni hitome
mishi goto wa arazu

---L.

Comments

[starlady]

This one is really beautiful. Ono no Komachi was so awesome.

[lnhammer]

Very awesome. And man does she stretch your understanding of what the language can do. I'll be posting her complete Kokinshu poems here over the next weeks, including some slight revisions to what I posted in my LJ.

---L.