Poem: Anonymous (?), KKS I:35

[lnhammer]

While it is tempting to pick a relatively easy translation tension, such as word order versus order of images, I think it is time to tackle the infamous pronoun problem and the related issue of context. Here's a particularly knotty one, one that would be even worse were it not for its complicated textual history.

Kokinshu #35 is from book 1, in the section of plum blossom poems. To explain the difficulty here, I need to lift up the hood and show the details of how to unpack a Japanese poem. ( Or at least how I do it, which as you've seen is often at length, and immodestly long posts go under a modesty cut. )

And that's it for me this week (unless someone really wants that word-versus-image-order post). I hope I've managed to convey something of the fun of translation, and the beauties of classical Japanese poetry -- or if not, that I was at least entertaining. And I leave you with a question: which of the above versions is "correct," and why?

---L.