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42
JAPANESE LITERATURE
Is it so with all men, or with me alone?
Born a man by the rarest of chances,
I am made in human shape like another,
Yet on my shoulders I wear a nuno cloak void of padding,
Which hangs down in tatters like seaweed—
A mere mass of rags.
Within my hut, twisted out of shape,
Straw is strewn on the bare floor of earth.
Father and mother at my pillow,
Wife and children at my feet,
Gather round me weeping and wailing,
With voices as from the throat of the nuye bird.
For no smoke rises from the kitchen furnace,
In the pot spiders have hung their webs,
The very art of cooking is forgotten.
To crown all—cutting off the end, as the proverb has it,
Of a thing that is too short already—
Comes the head man of the village with his rod,
His summons [to forced labour] penetrates to my sleeping-place.
Such helpless misery is but the way of the world.'"
Born a man by the rarest of chances,
I am made in human shape like another,
Yet on my shoulders I wear a nuno cloak void of padding,
Which hangs down in tatters like seaweed—
A mere mass of rags.
Within my hut, twisted out of shape,
Straw is strewn on the bare floor of earth.
Father and mother at my pillow,
Wife and children at my feet,
Gather round me weeping and wailing,
With voices as from the throat of the nuye bird.
For no smoke rises from the kitchen furnace,
In the pot spiders have hung their webs,
The very art of cooking is forgotten.
To crown all—cutting off the end, as the proverb has it,
Of a thing that is too short already—
Comes the head man of the village with his rod,
His summons [to forced labour] penetrates to my sleeping-place.
Such helpless misery is but the way of the world.'"
It is characteristic of the difference between the Japanese and English languages, that this poem in the original contains only seven personal (including possessive and relative) pronouns.
Some Tanka
No Edward FitzGerald has yet come to give us an English metrical version of the best Tanka of the Manyōshiu and Kokinshiu. A prose rendering must serve in the meantime. The translations correspond mostly line for line to the original.
The following are ten of a set of thirteen Tanka composed in praise of saké by Ōtomo-no-Yakamochi (died 785), after Hitomaro and Akahito, the most distinguished poet of his day. This is not a very common theme of
