A friend sent me a Japanese fortune telling, but I can't translate it

Would anyone be so kind to help us translate it? :smiley:

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I do not have much time right now, but the title is

末小吉: “meh” luck (number 56)

First sentence (bottom right:)

よろこびもあれば even though there are happy times
またうれいごともあり there will be bad times as well
吉凶かわるくあるていなり it is a state that alternates between lucky and unlucky.

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Here’s the other side of the lot, which includes some English:


(Taken from this Taiwanese site written in Chinese.)

The sentences at the bottom of the side that you posted are written in Classical Japanese, so they’ll require some searching. At the very least, I can’t translate them immediately without checking a dictionary for confirmation. There are also a lot of repetition/iteration symbols used. Take a look at the article below to get an idea of what they look like:

One example is the huge く that Naphthalene transcribed. It actually represents the repetition of a phrase. In this case, it’s the repetition of かわる.

I don’t really have much time (I’ve already spent a few hours hunting for various things that would confirm my suspicions or allow me to decipher certain things, and I haven’t covered much of the Japanese), so I’ll just translate the large kanji, because I’m 99% sure that it’s 漢文. They read like a poem when I use Chinese, so I’m pretty sure they’re actually Classical Chinese and not Japanese. That’s why there are so many kana in the margin that express how to decipher the lot in Japanese:

生涯喜又憂 In your life there will be joy and sorrow
未老先白頭 Before you grow old, your hair will turn white
勞心千百度 Your heart will be laboured a hundred thousand times
方遇貴人留 Then you will meet a benefactor who will stop it

I think the last two lines can also be translated as ‘the hundred thousand times your heart is belaboured will be brought to an end by a benefactor’, but I’m not sure if 勞心千百度 can be parsed as a noun phrase. It feels more like a clause to me… it might still work, but I don’t know if it’s common. I can read Classical Chinese to an extent, but I haven’t seen a lot of it, so I don’t know what usage patterns were common at the time.

As for the rest of the translation… I might come back and try to translate the rest if I feel like it, but I know it will take me quite a while if I want to include explanations and confirm that I’m not parsing incorrectly, so I might not do it. Trying working on the modern Japanese explanations on the other side of the lot (above) since they probably mean more or less exactly the same thing and don’t use any archaic grammar. I’ll just add an explanation to one thing that’s already been handled by Naphthalene:

After expanding the く, we get

吉凶 かわるかわる ある てい なり

if I add some spaces to help with parsing. なり is the Classical Japanese equivalent of だ・である. Sometimes it’s also the equivalent of にある in Modern Japanese, but that’s not the case here. 代わる代わる is an adverb and means ‘alternately, by turns, one replacing the other’. 吉凶 is the subject of ある, which is the noun-modifying form of あり, the Classical Japanese sentence-final form of today’s ある, so 吉凶 かわるかわる ある is a phrase that means ‘good and bad fortune occur/exist alternately’ that modifies a noun. てい used to be written as 体 or 躰. The kanji means ‘body’, but here, the ‘body’ meaning has been extended to mean ‘form, appearance, state’ (like with today’s すがた). Combining all these elements, you get Naphthalene’s translation.

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Uh, I thought so, but when I asked my spouse to confirm they said they didn’t think so. Oh well, it’s the usual problem with natives :woman_shrugging:

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I see. Uh… well, I don’t think かわるく exists as a phrase though, and that’s a pretty big く. The Wikipedia article aside, I did find (just one) Google search result saying it was「吉凶かわるかわるあるていなり」, and I figured that made the most sense. It also matches the Modern Japanese explanation given on the back of the lot. (There’s a 代わる代わる there too.) Did your spouse have any other ideas?

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Well, I do agree with your reading, so I don’t really feel like defending theirs. Their idea was that there are some weird words you can add, like けり, that add some emphasis and that it might be one. I’ve never come across く used like that, but what do I know. (Still, I think they are wrong on this one, especially now that I know that かわるかわる is a thing)

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Ah… OK, I see. I too am still leaning towards かわるかわる, but it’s true that I don’t know enough about Classical Japanese to say that く can’t do anything like that.

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At the same time, all the other く on that page are written normally, so very suspicious.

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Good point!
Speaking of the kana, @JesperHH, I believe all the し kana on the first page are written as long vertical lines. That gave me some trouble when I tried to read the text. Also, as the Wikipedia article said, iteration marks can take 濁点 (the ‘double dots’) as well. Knowing these two things should making deciphering the text a little easier.

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Heh, I was just about to say this looks like one of Senso-ji’s omikuji.

But yeah, the big kanji on the front are an extremely classical Japanese poem. Fortunately, the text underneath each line is a rendering of the line in modern Japanese. Well. Modern-ish.

I have one around the place somewhere…

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I’m pretty sure it’s written in kanbun though. I’m not going to claim that the poem is Chinese in origin, but the grammatical structure is definitely Chinese, not Japanese. You can see from the readings in the margin (which I believe follows kanbun conventions, which I haven’t learnt because I haven’t found a resource yet and I wasn’t a Japanese high schooler who had the option to take the subject) that for the final line on the left, the positions of 貴人留 and 遇 in the sentence are reversed in the Japanese transcription. For that matter, that’s probably why there’s a little 一 at the bottom and a little 二 next to 遇 so the reader knows the order in which the elements need to be parsed. It’s the same difference as between 時不待人 and 時(は)人を待たず: the first is the kanbun version, and the second is the Japanese translation. 貴人留 certainly doesn’t feel like any Chinese I’ve seen before though, and it’s translated as 貴人の留め, so it wouldn’t be surprising if this poem was written in Japan without any reference to outside sources. (I wonder if I can find examples of 留 being used like this – as a noun – in Classical Chinese… EDIT: Maybe it’s actually still a verb and refers to stopping and staying near this 貴人 after the encounter.)

It’s really cool that you recognised it. I honestly thought the name was read あさくさ though. :joy:

Haha I was lazy and skipped right to the Engrish bit in the middle, and although I haven’t pulled any fortunes in years, I just had to laugh inwardly at how much this one is spot-on for me so far this year. Le-sigh.

kinda makes me wonder, had I actually pulled a fortune this year, would I have gotten this same one or a different one, hmm :thinking:

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I honestly thought the name was read あさくさ though

This is a funny one; 浅草寺 is read せんそうじ but the 浅草神社 right next to it is read あさくさじんじゃ。The neighborhood of Tokyo is also called 浅草(あさくさ)

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Exactly the reason I wanted to say it that way, yes. However, I have a feeling that Buddhist temples have a tendency to use on’yomi. That might explain why it’s せんそうじ.

It’s both. And it took me forever to realise that “Senso(-ji)” and “Asakusa” are the on and kun readings (respectively) of the same kanji.

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I’m just lucky I speak Chinese, so I realised that I was looking at the on’yomi when you said it was ‘Sensō-ji’, but since I saw and heard ‘Asakusa’ when I was in Tokyo, I though one would say Asakusa for everything. I didn’t realise the reading might change for a temple. Then again, mixing on and kun is a little rarer than keeping one type of reading throughout, so… I guess I should have guessed.

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