"these wheels keep turning but they're running out of steam / keep me in your heart for a while"

[larryhammer]

Ki no Tsurayuki (c.865-945) was a mid-level imperial official from a fallen family -- during the 9th century, the Kis lost political power to the dominant Fujiwara clan. He made a name for himself as a poet in the 890s, enough of one that around 905 Emperor Daigo picked him to lead a committee editing an anthology of poetry in Japanese. At the time, there were three imperially commissioned anthologies in Chinese, but tastes had shifted enough to officially admit that maybe poets writing in their native language were good enough to stand beside those writing in the language of scholars -- and Tsurayuki & Co. set out to showcase the best of it. The result was the Kokinwakashu, "Collection of Old and New Japanese Poetry" -- or Kokinshu for short.

Tsurayuki is one of the most both lauded and hated poets in Japanese history, largely because of the Kokinshu: not only did the anthology champion a mode that, with training, almost any courtier could use to write a competent poem, it set the subjects and diction, and to a large degree the style, of Japanese poetry for the next thousand years (minus a couple decades). Its topics and arrangements defined what formal Japanese poems could be written about. The creation of other registers, and especially of modern poetry, meant breaking down the conventions of not just the previous century but the previous millennium -- thus the vilification. Even aside from his editorial legacy, however, Tsurayuki was a major poet, a master poetic craftsman in that mode. It's a graceful courtier's manner that's almost possible to translate adequately, in contrast to Narihira's or Komachi's compacted, elusive ambiguities or Teika's layered allusions that are a translator's despair.

Here are Tsurayuki's 11 poems from Kokinshu Book I, covering the first half of spring from icy New Years into sakura season:

2. Written on the first day of spring.
sode hijite musubishi mizu no kôreru o haru tatsu kyô no kaze ya tokuramu	The water I cupped in my hands, drenching my sleeves,     has long been frozen -- today, with the start of spring, will it melt in the wind?
Tsurayuki is the sort of poet who can stuff several seasons into a small poem, along with an allusion to a line from the Chinese Book of Rites, and make it all seem effortless. Untranslatable wordplay: musubu ("scoop up in cupped hands") can also mean "tie together," as in fastening one's clothing, and toku ("melt") can also mean "untie," and they both associate with "sleeve" to give interesting sexual overtones. Also: lovely, lovely sound in the original.
9. Written on falling snow.
kasumi tachi ko no me mo haru no yuki fureba hana naki sato mo hana zo chirikeru	The mists rise, and too buds are swelling on the trees --     when spring snowflakes fall, they are flowers scattering even in towns without flowers.
The rising of mists as the world melts and warms is Japanese signal of early spring. Subtle wordplay I've no idea how (or whether) to render in English: buried in tachi ko no me ("rise, tree-buds") is the sounds of the stem of tachikome(ru), "to enshroud," which would apply to the mists just before. Again, Tsurayuki manages to fit more into a small poem than you think ought to be possible, and make it all sound effortless and lovely.
22. Composed when the emperor commanded a poem be presented.
kasuga-no no wakana tsumi ni ya shirotae no sode furihaete hito no yukuramu	Are all these maidens heading to pluck the young greens     on Kasuga Plain, waving to one another their white mulberry-cloth sleeves?
In the Kokinshu, any unspecified imperial command would be from Daigo, who commissioned the anthology. Shirotae no ("mulberry-cloth-white") is a pillow-word for sleeve, here used in its literal meaning instead of as just a stock epithet for flavoring. Combined with how Kasuga Plain is outside Nara, not the Kyoto capital of Tsurayuki's day, it gives the poem a graceful, old-fashioned air. The original asks about "people," but the gathering of young greens for the festival on the seventh day of the first month was typically done by maidens. I suspect there's a bit of eroticism in those waving sleeves, given that sleeves were all that a modest Heian court lady showed in public.
25. Composed when the emperor commanded a poem be presented.
waga seko ga koromo harusame furu-goto ni nobe no midori zo iro masarikeru	My sweetheart spreads out her robes in the spring shower,     and with each rainfall the green of the open fields grows surpassingly vivid.
Commentaries connect the spreading of the robe to the annual springtime washing and airing out of the wardrobe, thus giving the prefatory statement no connection to the rest aside from providing the pivot of haru = "to stretch/spread out" / "spring (rains)". As this is more heavyhanded than I expect for Tsurayuki, I suggest an alternate interpretation. My reading would, however, make more sense if seko was not (at the time) a strongly gendered word for sweetheart/wife (what would a Heian court lady be doing outside in the rain?).
26. Composed when the emperor commanded a poem be presented.
aoyagi no ito yorikakuru haru shi mo zo midarete hana no hokorobinikeru	And such a springtime! -- tangling together the threads     of the green willows, disordering the flowers that burst apart at the seams.
Chronology problem: in the progression of the seasons, this skips ahead to willows coming into leaf during cherry blossom time, while the sequence hasn't gotten early plum flowers fully open. Some commentaries explain this away as a poem focused on the leafbuds, as part of a mini-arc on the greening of spring, but given the vividness of the flowers' fraying clothing, I'm not convinced. As for the poem itself, it is dressed in robes of learnedness, with the images of willow branches as threads and flowers bursting their seams both coming from Chinese poetry. I couldn't reproduce in English the original's balance of willow and flowers on either side of the middle line's spring (accompanied by three separate emphatic particles), and as it is I took some liberties with the verbs. At least I managed a pleasantly Chinese chiasmus in the two parallel images.
39. Written on Mt. Kurabu.
ume no hana niou haru-be wa kurabuyama yami ni koyuredo shiruku zo arikeru	The flowering plum! With its scent in the springtime,     even when we cross Mt. Shadows in the darkness, we indeed know it is there.
So many compromises here. Niou had an archaic meaning of "to be splended/have splendor" (pointing at the white flowers in darkness) as well as the main modern meaning of "to be fragrant" -- given the collection's previous two poems treat color and scent equally, not to mention given Tsurayuki's poetic ability, I suspect both senses are intended simultaneously. However, comma, I can't find an English equivalent for that double-reading. If one has to choose, given that the next two poems are about smelling plum flowers at the night, the perfume sense can be justified as part of this shift. Please keep the double-meaning in mind, however (maybe imagine the word "glow" is hovering over "scent" on your holographic screen). Mt. Kurabu is unknown, though it may be an old name of either Mt. Kurama or Mt. Kibune near Kyoto; it's being crossed in the darkness (yami) because its name puns on kurai, "dark" -- to keep the pun as unlabored as the original, I went with Mt. Shadows. The plum flowers are grammatically unmarked because ume no hana exactly fills a five-syllable line, and so can be read as subject of niou, direct address, or exclamation. (The mountain is also unmarked, but it pretty much can't be anything but the direct object of "cross".)
42. When he arrived, after long absence, at the house of the person with whom he habitually lodged when he made pilgrimages to Hatsuse, the person sent out word that "this inn" was always open to him. [Tsurayuki] then broke off a flower of the plum that stood there and recited this.
hito wa isa kokoro mo shirazu furusato wa hana zo mukashi no ka ni nioikeru	What goes on inside human hearts cannot be known,     but in my home town the plum blossoms still give off the same perfume as of old.
Hatsuse near Nara was the home of Hase temple. The original is just "flower" without the plum, but given headnote, plum in translation it is. Same niou as above, but here clearly with the sense of giving off scent. As an aside, many translations fail to bring out the host's sarcasm.
45. Written on the scattering of the plum flowers at his house.
kuru to aku to me karenu mono o ume no hana itsu no hitoma ni utsuroinuramu	At dusk and at dawn I never looked away, yet ...     O flowering plum, when, in what solitude, did you fade away and scatter?
Another grammatically ambiguous plum flower -- a direct address offered more pathos and less emo than exclamation or topic/subject of the final verb. Utsurou is an archaic verb meaning "to change," usually in the sense of "to fade" but sometimes "to scatter." Since commentaries don't seem to agree on which to read here, I went with both, bad practice that may be. The bad line-break at the end of line 4 is unworthy of a Tsurayuki poem, who has better control of his form than I do here.
49. Written on seeing flowers bloom for the first time on a cherry planted at someone's house.
kotoshi yori haru shirisomuru sakurabana chiru to iu koto wa narawazaranamu	So starting this year you've come to understand spring --     O cherry blossoms, would that you never be taught the meaning of scattering.
And with plums petals scattered, we move on to cherry blossom season. Note that like plum flowers, sakurabana exactly fills a five-syllable line and so often lacks a grammatical marker in poetry. Here it is almost certainly a direct address.
58. Written on a broken cherry branch.
tare shi ka mo tomete oritsuru harugasumi tachi-kakusuramu yama no sakura o	Who -- who in the world sought out and broke off a branch?     Spring mists, didn't you rise up and conceal them, these cherries of the mountains?
The effect of marking "who" with three emphatic particles is startling enough to render it more idiomatically than my usual. "Branch" is my interpolatation in both the headnote and poem. Grammatical bits: the spring mist is yet another unmarked five-syllable line, potentially addressee or subject of "rise-and-conceal," and the last three lines invert the normal sentence order with a fragmentary syntax reflecting Tsurayuki's supposed outrage.
59. Composed when the emperor commanded a poem be presented.
sakurabana sakinikerashi na ashibiki no yama no kai yori miyuru shirakumo	The cherry blossoms seem to have flowered at last:     white clouds seen in the steep-sloped valleys of the foot-weary mountains.
Tsurayuki often makes his pillow-word epithets pull more weight than the merely decorative, and here ashibiki no (original meaning uncertain but generally understood as something like "foot-dragging" or "foot-weary") modifying the mountains does indeed add a general sense of "rugged" to the valleys that are actually called "gorges" (kai). More puzzling to me is why pink cherry blossoms (sakura-iro is a light pink color) are seen as white.

(Eventually I'll find something else to obsess on, like the varieties of orange pekoe, or American politics. Till then ... )

---L.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

(Eventually I'll find something else to obsess on, like the varieties of orange pekoe, or American politics. Till then ... )

I will take Heian poetry over American politics any day. Especially if you go on explicating the subtleties that can't really be packed into the translation itself.

[larryhammer]

I've been posting individual poems (starting from the start of the book) over here (LJ feed). With the fuller, gorier notes.

---L.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

Those are beautiful. Keep obsessing over this for oh...ten, fifteen years.

[larryhammer]

The Kokinshu has 1,111 poems. That should last a few years ...

---L.