"no more "I love you"s / language is leaving me"

[larryhammer]

An exchange of poems from the Kokinshu by "author unknown" and Ariwara no Narihira. These also appear in Tales of Ise chapter 17, where they are said to be by an anonymous woman and an anonymous man, respectively, with no additional context.

62. Written when someone, after long absence, visited while the cherry blossoms bloomed.
ada nari to na ni koso tatere sakurabana toshi ni marenaru hito mo machikeri	These cherry blossoms that have a reputation     for being fickle wait even for those who rarely visit the rest of the year.
63. Reply.
kyô kozu wa asu wa yuki to zo furinamashi kiezu wa ari to mo hana to mimashi ya	If I had not come today, they would have fallen     tomorrow like snow -- and even if they don't melt, would they then still seem flowers?

To which I can only say: Way to let her down gently, dude.

(For those with browsers that don't display the sarcasm markup* correctly, let me here add: Not.)

Even aside from what comes through in translation, while the flowers in the first poem are clearly a metaphor for the woman herself, hana in general is also a common metaphor for feminine beauty. In the second poem, while furu means "to fall" for snow, it also puns with furu meaning, for a person, "to get old." Combined with the verbs inflected as counterfactual speculations and a final ya that's the most dubious of the question-marking particles, he's saying not just "yeah, it's over between us" but also "(besides,) would I even love you when you get old/lose your looks?"

Only saying it more elegantly and beautifully than my version.


* New with HTML 5.

---L.

Comments

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Whoa. That's harsh.

[larryhammer]

Yeah. And the poetry is pretty enough (and many translations vague enough) that you don't always catch what he's saying.

---L.