Kokinshu #101

[lnhammer]

A poem from the poetry contest held in the palace of the consort in the Kanpyô era.

    Blooming flowers are,
even in their variety,
    only transient,
and yet who among us can
hold a grudge against springtime?

—15 June 2011

Original by Fujiwara no Okikaze, whose dates are unknown but he appears in court records during the first two decades of the 900s. He was better known as a musician than poet, and has 17 poems in the Kokinshu. The slightly clumsy translation reflects the effect of having both "although" and "but" clauses. Also, apparently the rule that a question word like "who" cannot be a topic was also not yet settled.


saku hana wa
chigusa nagara ni
ada naredo
tare ka wa haru o
urami-hatetaru

---L.

Comments

Question word as topic?

[(Anonymous)]

I think the "ka wa" here is "question ka + exclamation wa", symbolizing rhetorical question with implied negative answer ("who holds a grudge against spring? [no-one, that's who") -- like at the end of no.95　(and similar to "ya wa") -- rather than "question ka + proto-topic-marker-off wa." With that analysis we are safe from question words as topics.

Also, did you choose "variety" anticipating "variegated" for tomorrow's "chigusa"? If not, very fortuitous!

--Matt

Re: Question word as topic?

[lnhammer]

And yanno, Shirane even lists that mid-sentence rhetorical usage of ka/kawa after a question word (his examples are after izure and nani). Sometimes, it pays to look things up.

Fortuitous, but when I realized where I was going with #102 I came back to this to make sure I was being consistent (and then grinned).

---L.