March 7th, 2010
224
I forget why I was thinking about it, but for some reason I had found myself in the middle of looking for a poem from a show called “Blue Sub No. 6″. The poem, as presented in the English version, goes this way:
“Today, today,”
Each day I have waited for you.
And now, do they not say you are strewn
with the shells of Ishi River?
The show makes an allusion to it being from the Manyoushuu, which is, wait for it, volumes and volumes of Japanese poetry, including thousands of poems. And, to top that off, they’re not written in modern Japanese, since they were written in the 7th-8th century.
So, I looked online and no one had even so much as ganked a transcription of the Blue Sub No. 6 version. Then, I gave up because no one had done the work for me, but, being who I am, I tried looking it up again to no avail. So, I had stumbled across the untranslated version of the Manyoshu at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center website (here). And so, in a stroke of what I can only call brilliance, I searched for a double-occurrence of the word (in Japanese) for “today” (今日). I found a poem that had it, and began trying to pick out words to translate to see what it was about. It turns out that it was the wrong poem. So, long, boring, frustrating story short, I searched for not only a double-occurrence of “today” but for a second phrase (thank you Virginia) of “Ishi River” (石川). And then I ended up at the right poem, Manyoushuu #224: here (look for the red text of 224).
I made a weak attempt (because Japanese is hard for me, apparently) at the translation of the end note (that’s the part marked by “[ＫＷ]” on the original) and of the poem itself:
I wait for you, saying,
“Today! Today! He will come today!”
Even though they all say
You have become mixed
With the things of the Ishi River gorge.Type: An Elegy
Author: Yosami no Otome (妻依羅娘子) (a woman)
Description: A song for Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (柿本人麻呂),
her husband, when he was near death at Shimane (島根).
In so doing, I learned more than I wanted to know about “Early Old Japanese”. For instance, how the transcription of the poem into modern Japanese doesn’t do it justice because it uses a completely different set of sounds (i.e. it’s in a markedly different dialect of the language). Or, you know, how the sentence particles are used completely differently. Also of note, the poem is setup having syllables occurring in 5-7-5-7-7. But wait! The modern Japanese looks like:
けふけふと, kyou kyou to, [sic] わがまつきみは, wagamatsukimiwa, いしかはの, ishikawano, かひに, まじりて, kahini, majirite, ありといはずやも arito iwazu yamo
The last line has 8! And, lo and behold, in this dialect, when two vowels occur side by side, one of them gets dropped. Go figure. So, 7 syllables it is. Also, the first line is literally romanized as “kefukefuto”, but I don’t know how you go from “today, today” (今日今日), which I would think turns into “kyou, kyou,” to “kefu, kefu.” Maybe someone can explain it.
At any rate, curiosity thoroughly exhausted.