Kokinshu #554

[lnhammer]

Topic unknown.

    Those times when I long
for you so very keenly,
    I wear through the night
dark as leopard-lily seeds
my sleeping robes inside-out.

—7 January 2011

Original by Ono no Komachi. Folklore held that if you slept with your sleeping robes turned inside out, you'd see what you desired in your dreams. Mubatama no (read in modern Japanese as either ubatama no or nubatama no, with little difference in meaning) is a stock epithet for the "night" of the "nightclothes" she wears, literally meaning "(as dark as) leopard-lily seeds" but basically adding the sense of jet-black or pitch-black. Given English is not used to applying an epithet to only part of a compound (where it would read as if the robe is dyed black) and the darkness adds to her isolation (and so shouldn't be lost), I ended up double-translating "night," much like a pivot-word. I'm at a complete loss for a way to replicate how the emphatic particle zo marks the action of reversing the robe.


ito semete
koishiki toki wa
mubatama no
yoru no koromo o
kaeshite zo kiru

---L.