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After parting and travel, the editors take things in a new direction with a book of wordplay poems. Since wordplay rarely carries over between languages, these are a challenge to translate -- in fact, I completely fail to reproduce their salient feature. I can only hope that at least I've made the poems interesting in themselves.
Aside from a couple acrostics, the game for most of these poems is called "hidden topic." The challenge here is to work the sound of a topic word (or phrase) into the poem's text without actually using the word itself. This is similar how pivot-words work, only without making the secondary meaning part of the poem, resulting in something of a word-find puzzle. Sometimes the poem is somehow related to the topic, and some even are riddles where the topic is the answer, but most of the time the topic is irrelevant. I've no idea what the ideal at the time was, but I personally like it when it is relevant.
The game fell out of fashion a few generations after the Kokinshu, and only one other imperial anthology includes any -- "facile wordplay instead of heartfelt emotion" was the judgment of later taste. (Modern readers often have a similar reaction to acrostic poems in English.) I like them, though, translation difficulties aside -- they show poets engaging with the possibilities of language in itself, even if the point was to be clever rather than write great poetry. Also, the first two groups of topics are sort of mini-recapitulations of the seasonal books, only this time with a lowered level of decorum and thus greater variety.
I mark the hidden topics in the romanized originals, though note that in modernized texts, after a millennium of pronunciation drift and spelling reforms, the poem-version sometimes doesn't exactly match the topic-version.
( Kokinshu X:422-468 )
And with that, we're through half the books of the Kokinshu, if not quite yet half the poems. Next up: the first of five books of love poems -- a topic as important as the four seasons. Expect it in six months or so. (ETA: This wasn't completed.)
(Index for this series)
---L.
Aside from a couple acrostics, the game for most of these poems is called "hidden topic." The challenge here is to work the sound of a topic word (or phrase) into the poem's text without actually using the word itself. This is similar how pivot-words work, only without making the secondary meaning part of the poem, resulting in something of a word-find puzzle. Sometimes the poem is somehow related to the topic, and some even are riddles where the topic is the answer, but most of the time the topic is irrelevant. I've no idea what the ideal at the time was, but I personally like it when it is relevant.
The game fell out of fashion a few generations after the Kokinshu, and only one other imperial anthology includes any -- "facile wordplay instead of heartfelt emotion" was the judgment of later taste. (Modern readers often have a similar reaction to acrostic poems in English.) I like them, though, translation difficulties aside -- they show poets engaging with the possibilities of language in itself, even if the point was to be clever rather than write great poetry. Also, the first two groups of topics are sort of mini-recapitulations of the seasonal books, only this time with a lowered level of decorum and thus greater variety.
I mark the hidden topics in the romanized originals, though note that in modernized texts, after a millennium of pronunciation drift and spelling reforms, the poem-version sometimes doesn't exactly match the topic-version.
( Kokinshu X:422-468 )
And with that, we're through half the books of the Kokinshu, if not quite yet half the poems. Next up: the first of five books of love poems -- a topic as important as the four seasons. Expect it in six months or so. (ETA: This wasn't completed.)
(Index for this series)
---L.