Kokinshu #98

[lnhammer]

(Topic unknown.)

    If the world behaved
as everything does in spring,
    then those days of old
that have indeed passed me by
would once again return.

—11 June 2011

Original author unknown, though in a later anthology this is attributed to Sosei. Absent a particle indicating it, I'm a little iffy on the grammatical relationship between goto ("all"/"every") and yo ("world") -- possibilities include "everything (in) the world" and "the world were (like) every (spring)." I went with the latter as requiring less patching (assume a missing topic marker, which is indeed common), but the former gives a slightly more graceful basic sense. The word translated as "behavior" (tsune) indicates habitual actions.


hana no goto
yo no tsune naraba
sugushite shi
mukashi wa mata mo
kaeri-kinamashi

---L.

Comments

Goto

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I can help with this! This "goto" is not 毎 but 如, the stem of the adjective more commonly seen in forms like gotoshi and gotoku. So the meaning of the first two lines is "If similarity to spring was the general rule/way the world worked/etc." I can't think of a truly satisfying translation offhand, but ideally it would convey that the "world" to be evoked is more the social world than the physical one. --Matt

Re: Goto

[lnhammer]

Ah! I see. That makes a lot more sense.

Oo -- and for an interesting statement. And an interesting challenge for translation. I'll have to think on't. (Why do I have the feeling the Elizabethans had an idiom that could convey that perfectly, which we've since lost?)

---L.

Re: Goto

[lnhammer]

I'm leaning strongly towards "the way of the world," what with its connotations in English:

    If it were the way
of the world to act like spring,
    then those days of old
that have indeed passed me by
would also return again.

---L.