"Bear them we can, and if we can we must. / Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

[larryhammer]

The more of the Kokinshu I translate, the more I appreciate how an anthology editor's choices create another story, the one assembled out of the collection. Not that I haven't been doing that myself with mixes for a couple decades, but being forced to go through the grass-level details at a slow foreign-language-learner's pace has made clearer how the selection of what to include and exclude as well as arrangement affects the whole.

So I had a fair bit of fun this week hosting poetry this week, as this gave me the chance to create a sort of mini-anthology of poems talking to each other across times and traditions:

"Hyla Brook," Robert Frost
Kokinshu 53, Ariwara no Narihira
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, A. E. Housman
"A Quoi Bon Dire," Charlotte Mew
"The Inlaid Zither," Li Shangyin
Kokinshu 658, Ono no Komachi
There's a certain Slant of light, Emily Dickinson

Offered here on the chance someone might enjoy the resulting story.

---L.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'm pretty much at the end of my LJ time for the morning, but I'll come back and read the story you've told through poems here.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.

...

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –



....Those excerpt affected me the most, but the poems, each itself, and all of them together, were quite moving.

It is a hard thing, we find, to be mortal, but A.E. Houseman spells out the hard true.

Thanks for this. I'm going to save the page. It's great what you did here.

[larryhammer]

I especially like that Housman poem of all of his, even over the one in which he coined the phrase "queen of air and darkness."

Thankee.

---L.