Larry's Pretty Good Poetry Journal

Topic unknown.

    I hear the wild geese
crying as they head north.
    Surely the number
they brought here was greater than
those who are returning home.

Some say that a man and woman went out into the provinces together, where the man died right after they arrived. While returning alone to the capital, the woman heard on the road the cries of wild geese returning (north) and wrote this poem.

—25 June 2013

Original author unknown. Blanket explanation: any time an animal "cries," assume it's the naku/"call"/"weep" wordplay. "Here" and "home" are interpretive but strongly implied by the verbs. The two emphatic statements with similar sentence structures reads rather flatly, even with the speculative conjugation, but Tsurayuki apparently liked this, as he later quoted it in the Tosa Diary. The mild implication that the woman is heading the opposite direction from the geese has provoked occasional speculation that the man may have been a soldier involved in the "pacification" of northern Honshu.


kita e yuku
kari zo nakunaru
tsurete koshi
kazu wa tarade zo
kaeruberanaru

kono uta wa, aru hito, otoko onna morotomo ni hito no kuni e makarikeri, otoko makari itarite sunawachi mi makarinikereba, onna hitori miyako e kaerikeru michi ni, kaeru kari no nakikeru o kikite yomeru to namu iu

---L.

He had invited one or two friends to go with him to the eastern provinces. When they arrived at a place called Eight Bridges in Mikawa Province, they saw rabbit-ear irises blooming especially beautifully on the river bank. Dismounting in the shade of a tree, he said he'd write [a poem] on the feelings of traveling with the characters of "kakitsubata" (rabbit-ear iris) placed at the start of every line, and then wrote this.

    Because I've a wife
as familiar as a cozy,
    well-worn Chinese robe,
I feel like a traveler
who has come from far away.

—16 June 2013

Original by Ariwara no Narihira. Now for some actual traveling. Mikawa Province is now Aichi Prefecture, and the site is now an iris garden on the grounds of Muryoju Temple in the modern city of Chiryû. In addition to the acrostic, Narihira has included an adverbial stock epithet (the Chinese robe), at least one pivot-word (nare- is "well-worn" for the robe and "familiar" for the wife, creating an implicit comparison), and five imagistically associated words -- thus showing he was as much a technical master as Komachi, though he didn't often show off this way. (Tsuma meaning "wife" / "hem/skirt" of a robe is another possible pivot, but I don't see how to join the phrases together -- I read the double-meaning as one of the associated words.) The rabbit-ear iris (Iris laevigata) is a purple Japanese species that grows in marshy ground. (The acrostic, btw, is more evidence that the 5-7-5-7-7 divisions (ku) of a poem were functionally equivalent to our "lines," despite the orthographic convention of writing poetry continuously.) (Note that the acrostic word's ba and the fourth line's ha- are different in modernized spellings, after a thousand years of language change, but were identical at the time. I'll have to figure out how to deal with this routinely for the book of acrostic poems.)


karakoromo
kitsutsu narenishi
tsuma shi areba
harubaru kinuru
tabi o shi zo omou

---L.

Topic unknown.

    I left the capital --
today, seeing Mika Plain's
    Izumi River,
the river wind is chilly.
Mt. Lending, lend me a robe!

—9 June 2013

Original author unknown. Another poem with a plain, continuing the connection of the first two poems. All three places are south of the capital, named in order as they appeared on the road to Nara -- they still do, but Mika Plain is now known as Kame Plain and Izumi River, which starts in it, is now Kitsu River. Pivot-word: the name of Mt. Kase is also read as a command to "lend." Commentaries debate whether to also read the mi of Mika Plain as "see," mika as "three days," or izumi as "when see," with the latter especially frowned upon as overdoing things (not to mention clogging up what's already compressed syntax).


miyako idete
kyô mika no hara
izumigawa
kawakaze semushi
koromo kaseyama

---L.

Written on seeing the moon in China.

    When I look up at
the distant plains of heaven,
    the moon that arose
over Mikasa Mountain
in the shrine of Kasuga!

Regarding this poem, the story is told that long ago Nakamaro was sent to study in China; after many years of not being able to go home, he had the chance to accompany a returning envoy from this country. When they set off, the people of that country held a banquet to see them off on the seashore of a place called Meishiu (Mingzhou). As night fell, an especially beautiful moon rose, and on seeing it he wrote this.

—11 May 2010

Original by Abe no Nakamaro, who was born c.700 and sent to Tang China to study in 717, where he died 54 years later. While there, he took the civil service exam and rose through the bureaucratic ranks to governor-general of a border province, and became friends with poets Li Po/Li Bo and Wang Wei. The banquet took place in 753, before his second of four failed attempts to return to Japan -- he had bad travel luck. This is his only poem in the Kokinshu, not to mention its oldest datable poem, and I previously posted it as Hyakunin Isshu #7. ¶ On to Book IX, a short collection of travel poetry that starts with settings off -- of which, this poem has two: Kasuga Shrine, at the foot of Mt. Mikasa near the then-capital Nara, was where departing envoys such as Nakamaro prayed for a safe return. Mingzhou is an old name for what's now Ningbo in Zhejiang Province, China.

(The extensive notes in this book are going to give me a workout in parsing out bungo prose -- and there's a couple places I'm not entirely confident I've correctly handled what's a single sentence in the original.)


ama no hara
furisake mireba
kasuga naru
mikasa no yama ni
ideshi tsuki kamo

kono uta wa, mukashi nakamaro o morokoshi ni mono narabashi ni tsukawashitarikeru ni, amata no toshi o hete e kaeri maude kozarikeru o, kono kuni yori mata tsukaimakari itarikeru ni taguite, maude kinamu tote idetachikeru ni, meishiu to iu tokoro no umibe nite kano kuni mo hito muma no hana mukeshikeri, yoru ni narite tsuki no ito omoshikusashi idetarikeru o mite yomeru to namu katari tsutauru

---L.

Written when parting with someone he'd talked with at a rocky spring in Shiga Pass.

    As an offering
from a mountain spring muddied
    by drops from cupped hands
is unsatisfying, so too
parting from, ah!, this person.

—2-10 June 2013

Original by Ki no Tsurayuki. To transition into the travel poetry of the next book, the first of two poems of parting while traveling. In addition to being set outside the sophisticated capital, it's written in an old-fashioned manner with a description prefatory to the main subject hinging on the pivot-word aka, a water offering to the Buddha / akade, "not satisfied," which latter in turn explicitly applies to the clauses before and after it. (The offering sense is required, though many commentaries and translations ignore it, as otherwise the spring's genitive marker makes no sense.) Effect lost in translation: the original is bookended with musubu, here "scoop up (in the hand)" but can also mean "bind together," and wakarenuru, "have parted." The poem was immediately and enduringly popular, and frequently referenced by other Heian writers. It is often specifically interpreted as a love poem, with the "someone" a woman -- it wouldn't be the only time Tsurayuki flirted on this road.


musubu te no
shizuku ni nigoru
yama no i no
akade mo hito ni
wakarenuru ka na

---L.

(Topic unknown.)

    With things looking dark,
I wish it fell anyway.
    Then I would hang
the soaked clothes on the spring rains
and so detain my lord here.

—2 June 2013

(Original author unknown.) Textual issue: in l.2 I've emended the goto of my base text to koto for the same reasons as in #82. The speaker is almost certainly a woman talking to or about her lover, given a higher-level courtier wouldn't be making visits to a lower one. Nurekinu kisete means literally "making (someone) wear soaked clothing" but idiomatically "putting the blame on (someone)," often especially to frame them -- and both meanings are relevant here. English can almost reproduce this double meaning, if not quite idiomatically. Kakikurashi also has a double-meaning, to get dark from being overcast and to be depressed.


kakikurashi
koto wa furanamu
harusame ni
nureginu kisete
kimi o todomemu

---L.

Topic unknown.

    As a memento
I wrap the white gems on this sleeve
    that is departing,
although not tired of you --
and only then do I go.

—30 May 2013.

Original author unknown. Same opening as #396, though this is obscured by English syntax. The gems are, of course, tears and the sleeve metonymy for the departer. This is most easily read as a man taking his leave of a woman, with the sleeve and tears being his, but other permutations are possible. More properly, "of you" modifies the memento, but moving it sounds more idiomatic.


akazu shite
wakaruru sode no
shiratama o
kimi ga katami to
tsutsumite zo yuku

---L.

Written in return.

    And while unaware
that someone's heart might regret
    our parting now,
my body has descended
(like autumn rain) into age.

—28 May 2013

Original by Prince Kanemi. Not bad for improv, especially given he worked in the wit of a pivot-word, if a bog-standard one: furu is "fall" of the rain / "get old" of himself -- "descend" is the bog-standard translation. Omitted-but-understood again: "our parting now."


oshimuramu
hito no kokoro o
shiranu ma ni
aki no shigure to
mi zo furinikeru

---L.

Written when the Ninna Emperor was a Crown Prince, when he was returning from viewing Furu Waterfall.

    My tears of parting --
for I'm not weary of you --
    join the waterfall.
Downstream, they might even see
that the waters are rising.

—23 May 2013

Original by Kengei. Not much is known about this monk aside from that he's a grandson of Minamoto no Tôru (born 822, see #724), was active before Emperor Kôkô's 884 enthronement, and has 4 poems in the Kokinshu. ¶ Kôkô being the Ninna Emperor again (see #21). For Furu, see #248 (there's no indication this is from the same visit). The final couplet can also be read as a question, and that may even be the more natural way. Another where the language of friendship (or flattery) is indistinguishable from love poetry.


akazu shite
wakaruru namida
taki ni sou
mizu masaru to ya
shimo wa miruramu

---L.

Written under the cherry blossoms when the Prince of Urin Temple had climbed the mountain for a memorial service and was returning.

    If only the cherries
whirled about in disorder
    in the mountain wind
-- you might then be detained in
the confusion of flowers.

—15 May 2013

Original by Henjô. For the Urin Prince, Tsuneyasu, see #95. This is structurally very similar to #392.


yamakaze ni
sakura fukimaki
midarenamu
hana no magiri ni
tachitomarubeku