Kokinshu #79

[lnhammer]

Written on seeing mountain cherry [blossoms].

    The haze of springtime --
why must it conceal them?
    I would at least like
to see the cherry blossoms,
if only while they scatter.

—1 March 2011

(Original by Ki no Tsurayuki) -- at least by the convention that when no author is given it's carried over from the previous poem. There's some scholarly dispute over this, apparently fueled by his not including it in his collected poems. As with #69, here's not one but two nouns without case-markers: our old friend the haze (potentially address, exclamation, or subject of "conceal") and the blossoms (potentially address, exclamation, or subject of "scatter", and in any case also direct object of "see"), giving a large matrix of possible readings. Given they are both nouns balanced at the start of paired sentences, I wanted to treat them equally, which meant taking both as subject (though the constraints of English syntax obscures this). Less straining would be "O haze of springtime, / why must you conceal them?" -- but grace in the target language is not a good reason for choosing a reading of the original. A more literal and colloquial version might be "what's with the concealing them?"


harugasumi
nani kakusuramu
sakurabana
chiru ma o dani mo
mirubeki mono o

---L.

Comments

"What's with the concealing them?"

[(Anonymous)]

Heh, I like that. A lot of these poems could benefit from Borscht Belt translations. "Spring haze, again with the concealing. What, I can't look at the cherry blossoms while they're falling even?"

One problem with taking the "harugasumi" as direct address is that it makes the "ramu" a bit weird, or maybe passive-aggressive: "I wonder why you're doing that?" -- of course that second line could be a whole new sentence, which then makes it slightly catty: "Yo, spring haze! [aside] Why's he always getting in the way like that") So I think your choice works well here.

Personally I don't want this to be one of Tsurayuki's because I find the combined "harugasumi" and "sakurabana" sort of leaden and bloated.

Re: "What's with the concealing them?"

[(Anonymous)]

Er, --Matt

Re: "What's with the concealing them?"

[lnhammer]

That too, about second person and -ramu.

A lot of KKS poems work in a Borscht Belt treatment. Though not Komachi -- she does better in teenspeak:

"It's, like, so not true
that nights are getting longer,
'cause we'd just hooked up
and were all, woah, when like -- woah --
it was all dawn already. Jeeze!"

(#635)

---L.