Thanks a lot ! Yeah I think that I will just keep this thread like it is, perhaps one day modifying the first post a little… by the way I just realised the UVirginia website is down, I really hope it will come back because it would be extremely sad to lose such a gold mine.
I was thinking recently about a poem from the Hyakunin Isshu (百人一首), the anthology at the source of the karuta card game who is apparently played a lot in Japan… and was displayed these last years in the ちはやふる manga and anime (I still haven’t watched it but I have heard it’s great).
It’s the 84th, written by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke :
ながらへば
またこの頃や
しのばれむ
憂しと見し世ぞ
今は恋しき
If I live, perhaps
I will be nostalgic again
of these present days ;
just like the sad, anxious past,
has now became comforting.
永らえる : to live long, to have a long life ; ば plays here the role of “if”.
また : again, once again, also
この頃 : these days, the present, this time
や : I’ve read in a bungo introduction book written by Hellen Craig McCullough (I also recommend her beautiful translation of the Kokinshû) that this particle can have an interrogative function, something that express doubt when it’s in a medial position (which I believe it is in this poem). This function can also apparently be indicated by the presence of む in the sentence, and we can see it in the next word :
しのばれむ < しのぶ = 偲ぶ : to remember with nostalgia, to be nostalgic
憂し : sadness, anxiety, melancholy
The next part was hard to understand for me. I’ve read other translations of this poem before and they were almost all talking about the melancholic past memories that the author remembers, but I couldn’t make sense of the kanji “see” and “world”. I’ve looked up this website and here is what it says about it :
「見し」の「し」は過去の助動詞「き」（実際の体験の回想）の連体形です。
→ The し of 見し is the rentaikei of the past auxiliary き which means “to remember something that we lived, a real lived-experience”.
But I don’t see why き means “to remember an experience”. I’ve read in a kobun dictionary that 見る can also means “to experience something”. So the し indicates here the past, but why does it bring the meaning “to remember” ?
Now, the kanji 世. Apparently the first definition in the kobun dictionary is “one’s life”, the life of a person.
That 4th line of the poem really confuses me because I saw a translation that basically said something like “the world I saw as a melancholic place” but almost all the other translations were talking about the life of the poet himself, not “the world” in general…
If anyone could bring some light on this I would appreciate it, right now I just chose to trust the website and to keep the meaning “the melancholic memories of past experiences”.
And the last line :
今 : right now, today
恋しき : rentaikei of the adjective 恋し. The rentaikei here is used because it gives a quality to something, it attributes the adjective 恋し to the experiences that were sad in the past but are now beloved/missed/yearned for. At least that’s how I understand it.
If anyone is seeing any mistakes please correct me.
What I love about poems like this one is the universal aspect of it. The emotion expressed here by Kiyosuke is really one that every human in history has already felt… It always amazes me to think for example about the poets of the Kokinshû, living more than a thousand years ago on this island that is so so far away for westerners like me, writing words that reverberated for more than a thousand years to finally find echoes in today’s hearts (if I remember correctly the preface of the anthology, its goal was to touch “all the hearts in the world”).
Some poets of the Hyakunin Isshu are a few centuries more recent, but it’s still a long time and it really shows how humans have always been fundamentally the same. I found this great article who explains the scientific aspect of it. It might be just a cognitive bias but in the end, does it take away the beauty of nostalgia, does it really matter ? For me, definitely not.