That is indeed an impressive translatoin. Nice find.
I’m curious about these legends. From your comment about sexism I presume they are not particularly flattering, which I’m surprised to hear. Did you find them directly sexist or indirectly/systemically so? I would expect her to be more respected as one of the thirty-six immortals.
Off the top of my head they include:
I suppose the last one isn’t sexist per se, but it’s the same emphasis we see in the west of beauty fading being a negative thing to happen. Far too often it carries the implication with it that once feminine beauty fades nothing worthwhile remains.
0 voters
Thanks again to people who contribute 
Thanks to you all, this thread is everything I hoped for and more 
Even though I feel bad for not contributing myself.
That makes sense and I follow. I must admit that the second one made me chuckle just because I wasn’t expecting that. The third one is neat mostly because she herself is commenting on the same thing in this very poem–I wonder how much the legend existed already in her own time, and how that can affect our reading of the poem.
A saw someone displaying Karuta cards on their wall recently and recognized them! Already enjoying real-world benefits from our studies. I was really excited to be able to do that and it was fun trying to figure out what the handwriting said.
gah! I wanted 15 but clicked the wrong thing by accident. What do?
Show vote> change vote.
I picked 13 because I can’t get enough of the 恋歌.
thank you very kindly
10 これやこの 行くも帰るも 別れては 知るも知らぬも 逢坂の関 （蝉丸）
The first time I read this it didn’t vibe with me super strong so I’m really glad I decided to revisit it, because man, Yamato is right, this is a cool rhythm. I don’t think I’m quite on the level of phonetic awareness to get how 5-7-5 is a pretty rhythm in Japanese the way I get Indo-European meters, but I really feel it here with all of these parallel structures. I’m going to chalk it up to the biwa player having a good sense of rhythm.
I also really like this poem just because it is more immediately understandable to me with my knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.
Not much concretely is known about him besides being a poor, blind biwa player living in early-Heian Ausaka, but I did find that he went on to become a literary figure of some importance. According to a book of which I only could acces the preview, “The Legend of Semimaru” (linked below), the actualy corpus of Semimaru texts isn’t unmanageably large but the legend itself is and was VERY widely known, morphing to suit various eras’ and authors’ needs as times changed. Some thought him to be a Prince turned beggar (likely originating from an Indian legend), the father of various schools of biwa, and even an actual kami or incarnation of a Buddha (I forget which one and can’t find it again).
One source I found claims he was an apocryphal character of medieval origin, but if that were the case, who wrote this poem? I guess it could be a misattribution. There’s definitely opportunity for some really cool research here, but I’m treating this more as “casually share cool findings with your pals” than full on peer-review article mode. That being said, man I can’t wait until my Japanese is good enough to really start biting into proper Japanese-language scholarship.
The most prominent of these nowadays seems to be Zeami’s Noh play. I don’t know much about Noh, though know I want to seeing how many of these poets end up becoming characters in Noh theatre (I mostly just mean Onono Komachi but i feel like we’ll encounter more). According to the French Wikipedia article, which is except for this detail mostly a translation of the English article, it is unknown whether or not the Noh Semimaru is the same as that of Hyakunin Isshu, but I presume what they meant was they aren’t sure how historically accurate the depiction is, referring to his legendary status described in the above cited monograph.
This is another thing I read somewhere and can’t refind the link for, but I saw a comment saying that his most famous poem is about the fleetingness of human relationships and why we shouldn’t get to attached to others. I presume that interpreter was talking about this poem. What a hyper-Buddhist interpretation, eh? Considering cultural context, that is understandable.
The way I read it, however, was as more of an appreciation simply of the energy of the high-traffic area in which he lived. The strong sense of rhythm, especially in the various parallels, for me creates more of a buzzing energy than quiet contemplation separate from others. Still, I think whoever made the Buddhist reading is probably up to something quite insightful. I wish I could find it again.
I’ve never seen this contraction/shortening/whatever you call it of using verbs substantively in Japanese. Is it like Latin participles? Has anyone else seen this before? I wonder if it is particular to Classical Japanese because I think I read somewhere that they have participles. I’ll look into it some more later but this seemed very linguistically interesting.
https://archive.org/details/legendofsemimaru00matirich/page/n17/mode/2up
http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/noh/KeeSemi.html
https://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/sbklein/images/NOH/nohmasks/pages/semimaru.htm
French and English Wikipedia articles
While I’m posting, apparently Peter Macmillan’s translation of Hyakunin Isshu contains a wonderful essay on Onono Komachi’s poem from last week. I’m going to see if it exists in any other form freely and legitimately available online besides the preface to his translation.
You mean the dropping of 人/者? Not that I remember, but that sounds like something that would happen in poetry…
14 陸奥の しのぶもぢずり 誰故に みだれ初めにし 我ならなくに (河原左大臣)
I chose this purely because it was one of the two left over from what everyone else chose. Turns out it was quite a good choice, because there was a lot of interesting information about it to be found. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s loads that I still haven’t seen, but for now, here’s what I found:
河原左大臣 was renowned for his courtly elegance and it is rumoured that he was used as a model for the hero in the Tale of Genji. Formerly the son of Emperor Saga, he has been made commoner and had to go by the name みなもと, just like Genji. He later became known as ‘the Riverbank Minister of the Left’ after building a huge mansion on the west bank of the Kamo River in Kyoto, in which he hosted poetry gatherings.
This poem is also the reason some believe him to have travelled all the way to Shinobu, in the northeast of Japan, for official business, where he fell in love with a local woman, which in turn delayed his return home. When he did have to leave, it supposedly inspired him to write this poem. Although this is very likely not the truth, the use of Shinobu became a famous 歌枕(うたまくら: oft-repeated descriptive epithets in poetry. Thanks Jisho).
The exact meaning of the poem is still debated, as it can either be interpreted as the poet’s defence of his faithfulness to his wife, or as an expression of a secret love to someone else. In the latter case, he is actually shifting the blame from himself onto the lady in question for being too attractive. In the Heian period, a forbidden love meant being in love with another man’s wife or with a woman of much higher rank than one’s own.
As such, the ‘wild’ or ‘tangled’ pattern of the しのぶもぢずり represents the heart moved by love through no fault of oneself (われならなくに).
The first two lines of this poem can be read as 序詞 (じょことば: ‘prefatory modifying statement of a waka, etc.’, courtesy of Jisho. Also related to 枕詞, which we’ve also seen before, but it is not restricted by the number of syllables.) to the following みだれそめにし. After he then goes on to ask who would be responsible for these feelings of his (誰故に), and eventually shifts the blame from himself in the last line, using a form of 倒置法 (とうちほう: word order inversion in a sentence). Grammatically, that line should sit before the third line; the open ended question inferring the blame lies with the other party, the woman. That grammatical and syntactic break after the fourth line is a poetic device called しくぎれ.
As with some of the other poems, we have yet more かけことば in this one.
しのぶ can actually refer to three different things in this poem: the actual location mentioned above, the plant (fern), or the verb meaning. In the latter case, the verb itself has different meanings as well: ‘to conceal’, ‘to endure’, or, if written with a different kanji, ‘to think longingly of’, hence the inferred meaning of ‘to love secretly’.
みだれ in みだれそめにし refers to being in disarray. そめ can either mean ‘to dye’ or ‘to begin’. The former is 縁語 (えんご: associated word), referring back to しのぶもぢずり.
Shinobu in Michinoku, referenced in the poem, is now the city of Fukushima and was, among other things, famous for its pattered cloth dyed by しのぶもぢずり. Fern would be rubbed onto cloth to create a ‘wild’ or ‘tangled’ pattern.
A big rock, the もぢずり stone, lies in the ground in a small Kannon temple in the outskirts of Fukushima City; supposedly it was used to create the pattern by using it to rub the fern pattern onto cloth. It is also said that the woman left behind by みなもと visited that same temple 100 times, after which she was able to see his face in the stone like a mirror.
In the first story of ‘The Ise Stories’, this poem is referenced as well. In the story, a man was hunting in Kasuga, Nara, when he spied two sisters through a crack in a fence. He used his hunting cloak, which had theしのぶもぢずり pattern printed on it, to write a poem and send it to the sisters. Their answer was this poem, written by 河原左大臣.
もぢずり refers to a type of plant, called ねじばな in modern Japanese.
https://100poets.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/whos-fault-is-it-poem-number-14/
https://adblankestijn.blogspot.com/2016/04/hyakunin-isshu-one-hundred-poets-one_2.html
http://www.jlit.net/premodernlit/hyakunin-isshu/poems_11-20.html
As always, please do add to or question all of this, chances are I’m wrong 
I presume this is a typo but I think you got your 福 cities mixed up.
This poem was a hard one for me. One of these days I’ll have to read Genji in translation. I think once I know better how Genji acts, revisiting this poem will be a lot more interesting.
I wonder if you could say the “tangled” pattern that represents his heart is also represented in the tangled grammar as well as trickiness of the かけことば. I really appreciate the formal aspects you’ve pointed out.
I’m always getting my 岡 cities mixed up. 静岡, 福岡, what’s the difference?
This is easy for me because I love Kyushu dialects. 福岡 speaks the Funner dialect!
Very much a type, will go and fix it now
In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t have chosen it either, personally. But as I said, it was actually quite interesting to research. Also, I haven’t read Genji either, but from what I understand, it was mainly the author’s life, more so than the poem itself that seems to have supposedly been inspiration for Genji.
And I really like the sentiment that the print pattern is also reflected in the form and structure used here.
Yeah, I was thinking more about how personality might be reflected in the poem.
11 わたの原 八十島かけて 漕ぎ出でぬと 人には告げよ 海人の釣舟 （参議篁）
“Over the wide sea
Towards its many distant isles
My ship sets sail.
Will the fishing boats thronged here
Proclaim my journey to the world?” - by University of Virginia Library Japanese Text Initiative
Another translation with a bit more liberty and background information:
“Fishing boats upon this sea!
Tell whoever asks
I am being rowed away to exile
out past the many islets
to the vast ocean beyond.” - by McMillan, 2010
The poem even inspired Japan’s famous painter Hokusai Katsushika to this painting:
In 834, he was appointed
Within two years he regained the graces of the court and returned to the capital where he was promoted to Sangi (an associate counselor in the Imperial court of Japan, i.e. a government position) which made him also known as
This poem was composed while
One day in the palace of Saga Tennou, someone erected a scroll with the writing “無悪善”. No one in the palace was able to decipher its meaning. The emperor then ordered Takamura to read it, and he responded:
“It will be good if there is no evil (悪無くば善からん, saga nakuba yokaran ),”
reading the character for evil (悪, aku ) as “Saga” to indicate Saga Tennou. The emperor was incensed at his audacity and proclaimed that because only Takamura was able to read the scroll, he must have been the one who put it up in the first place. However, Takamura pleaded his innocence, saying that he was simply deciphering the meaning of the scroll. The emperor said, “Oh, so you can decipher any writing, can you?” and asked Takamura to read a row of twelve characters for child (子):
“子子子子子子子子子子子子”.
Takamura immediately responded:
neko no ko koneko, shishi no ko kojishi (猫の子子猫、獅子の子子獅子),
using the variant readings ne , ko, shi, ji for the character (子). This translates to
“the young of cat (猫, neko ), kitten (子猫, koneko ), and the young of lion (獅子, shishi ), cub (子獅子, kojishi ).”
The emperor was amused by Takamura’s wit and removed the accusation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ono_no_Takamura
https://books.google.de/books?id=y-37CgAAQBAJ&pg=PT236&lpg=PT236#v=onepage&q&f=false
Painting: http://hanga-museum.jp/ecollectionimage/list005
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangi_(Japan)
Detailed analysis (Japanese): https://honda-n2.com/honkoku-ogura-hyakunin-isshu-11
https://nbataro.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-66.html
We are finishing the first part of the book this week! There’s an easy quiz at the end… that made me realize I only remember the name of 蝉丸 (because it was funny) 
I guess I also remembered the “小町” half of 小野小町, but I’m mixing up my emperors/empresses Anyway
0 voters
I delayed a bit to make sure that we would get research for the previous week… but I guess it would just make things worse to delay further 
Should we take a “break” in moving forward to get enough time to analyze the poems we have already?
Also, I guess we could just keep going in this one thread, considering we do not have that much conversation. Do you all still think it makes more sense to make a new thread for the next part?
Yes, I thought so too. The condensed format of “one poem one research result” makes this thread easy enough to follow. In general I’m a fan of separating “organization” and “contents” but it is fine here as-is.
Participation seems to drop of quickly, indeed 
And we did not even manage to cover all poems from last week, so I was wondering whether we’d need to decrease the number of poems per week? (Already?)
I agree, we can just keep it here, it doesn’t get as much conversation as it initially seemed.
Counter suggestion: why don’t we keep the 5 poems, but after every section of 20 (since they are already divided like that in the book) we take a week to research whichever poems didn’t get any research done for? A catch up week if you will.
So next week, we’d make a poll for all the poems that haven’t been done and see if we can catch up like that.
That way, if people do feel like randomly popping in and dissecting a poem, they can. Since it’s not narrative, I feel like people are more likely to join sporadically if they see there’s still open slots. Also, chances are there’s some of us that just don’t have the time, so should they sudden do have a spare few minutes, it’ll give them a chance to join in anyway.
I really hope I’m making sense here, but I’m not quite awake yet
That being said, I’m happy to reduce the amount of poems a week too if that’s easier. Since generally everyone does one each, it won’t make much of a difference. On a purely selfish note though, I quite like doing 5 poems a week. Considering I’m not actually trying to memorise them (maybe a little bit, but not really), reading through 5 a week hit a good sweet spot for me.
But as I said, I don’t mind reducing.
