your translation is really poetic, thanks for sharing that
and the theme is obviously quite a deep one, I will add this to a book of poems where I collect my favourites.
If you have time (although after reflecting on the poem I can understand if you don’t), could you add the kanji version and a few notes about some of the trickier parsing you had to do to understand this?
I just left home but I will do this tonight ! Easier to write long posts on computer.
no rush, I appreciate it!
Ok so here is what I am 99% sure is the kanji version of the waka :
終に行く
道とは予て
聞きしかど
昨日今日とは
思はざりしを
Like I said in the initial post, I had already read a few translations (6, to be precise) of the poem before trying to dissect the original text, so it was easier for me because I already knew the meaning of the waka. But here is what my process was :
つひ = 終 : the end (in general) but also the end of life ; death
ゆく = 行く or 往く : to go, to walk along, to move through [it’s also interesting to note that the 4th definition on the kobun dictionary includes “to die” (死ぬ), “to leave this world” (この世を去る)]
みち = 道 : the road, the way, the path (I prefer “way” or “path” for this poem)
かねて = 予て : previously, already, beforehand, for some time
ききしかど = 聞きしかど : I heard ; I think the ど means “but”, just like the poem 57.
For some time I have heard of this path…
道とは予て
聞きしかど
…we must walk along in the end… (of life ; but it’s clearly not necessary to precise it, in my translation I wrote it like that because I wanted more syllables. And now that I am reading it again I think that we can also write “…I must walk along in the end…” but I prefer the “we” because it really shows the universality of death. In fact, in the 6 translations I’ve read, there was only one that used “I” instead of “we”)
終に行く
… BUT… (ど)
きのふけふとは
おもはざりしを
きのふ = 昨日 : yesterday
けふ = 今日 : today
思はざりし : I knew that this word was from “思” but I didn’t really understand the grammar so I asked Chat-GPT about that and from what I read, “は” is a subject marker, “ざり” is the negation of the auxiliary “す” who indicates the accomplishment of an action, and “し” indicates the past (just like in the poem 98 I believe).
Thinking + negation + past = I didn’t think ; but I wrote “I never thought” in my version of the translation because I feel like it gives a little more strength to the meaning of it… like “I NEVER thought that I would die today, it’s just an unbelievable thing…” but in most of the translations that I’ve read, they just say “I didn’t think”.
And now that I am reading again my translation, I think I could have written “we must walk along” instead of “that we all follow”. But in the translations I have read before, 3 were saying “we all must follow/travel” and I think it’s better like that, even if the “all” is not really written.
There were also 2 translations that said “yesterday or today” instead of “yesterday I didn’t think…” but personally I think it’s much more beautiful to say “yesterday I didn’t think that I would be going today” instead of “I didn’t think that it would be yesterday or today”.
Like you can see grammar is still very hard for me, but I feel like I still have a good understanding of this poem now. The “きのふけふ” confused me at first because in the romanization of the poem I saw “kinô kyô to wa” but then I just looked it up in the kobun dictionary.
I think I didn’t make mistakes in this analysis but if anyone sees something don’t hesitate to correct me !
I found this page which has an analysis of this poem. It gives the kanjified text as
つひにゆく道とはかねて聞きしかど昨日今日とは思はざりしを
It also has a grammar breakdown. ChatGPT has led you down the garden path, especially with that claim that the は is a subject marker – it is just the historical kana spelling of the mizenkei ending of 思う, which in modern spelling we would write 思わ (in eg 思わない). Here’s what the page says about the last line:
思は ハ行四段活用「おもふ」の未然形
ざり 打消の助動詞「ず」の連用形
し 過去の助動詞「き」の連体形
を 間接助詞または接続助詞
ざり is a conjugation of ず, not す, and it means negation, not accomplishment. There are several variants of how this auxiliary verb inflects, and which was most used apparently changed over time. The ざり form is supposedly originally from ず plus あり to be, but in this fused form it’s just a negation, with no extra meaning beyond plain ず.
し is indeed past tense (rentaikei of the aux verb き).
I found ChatGPT was sadly not at all trustable on classical Japanese grammar analysis, at least on the free version.
This is just historical kana spellings again. You’ll see きょう written けふ in pre WW2 modern Japanese with historical spellings too; it’s not specific to classical.
I wrote a guide to how historical kana spellings work on another forum; the rules for reading them are not too complicated. (If for some reason you wanted to write in the historical spellings that would be painful…) In this case the relevant parts are that -eu and -ehu → -you, and は column kana are pronounced wa / i / u / e / o except at beginning of a word.
Thanks a lot for the correction ! In the future I will not trust Chat-GPT about classical japanese anymore 
I didn’t know about historical kana spellings, it’s interesting.
It makes me realize the quantity of things I don’t know yet about this language. I know it’s definitely premature for me to dissect these poems, but it helps me to stay motivated…
The kobun dictionary has an entry for 昨日今日 as a single noun, by the way, which it glosses as
① このごろ。近ごろ。
② 事態が切迫して猶予がないこと。
where I guess we want the second one, imminent and undeferrable. But it cites this exact poem, so it’s not totally clear whether we’re not just going round in circles…
Wow, thanks both! This is quite complex and I’d be totally lost without this discussion!
Still a long way to go before spring, but in these bleak winter days I thought I would share this waka that I’ve read from quite a long time : the 64th poem of the Shûi wakashû (拾遺和歌集), written by the famous Ki no Tsurayuki :
桜散る
木の下風は
寒からで
空に知られぬ
雪ぞ降りける
The cherry blossoms
scatter under the tree with
a not so cold wind ;
but here it is ! falling…
…a snow unknown by the sky.
I wrote this translation but just like for the others, I had already read some other translations before trying to understand it on my own, so I already knew the meaning. But I still had to read the equivalent in modern japanese to see that 寒からで was the negative form of “cold”. I think the で is the negative suffix here ?
I think that 知られぬ is negative because of the ぬ that would be replaced by ない in modern japanese, and that the verb is in its passive form since it would be 知られない in MJ ?
And I guess ぞ places emphasis on 雪.
There are very few cherry trees where I live, but it still gives me joy to think about the moment when I will finally see them in bloom. And yet, at the same time, I feel already a little bit stressed and sad, knowing that they will disappear just as fast as they came into this world. But just like in the 70th and the 71th poems of the Kokinshû, we would surely not like them more if we could just say “wait” to make them stay… Separation from beings and things is inevitable… the universe itself will die one day. And long before that, we will have to say goodbye to loved ones, pets, happy memories, everything. But is it really so bad ? Would it be really better to live forever, never changing ? I don’t know… I guess some people would like that. With transhumanism, perhaps humans will live several centuries one day. But on the other hand, beauty resides in the ephemeral, and it’s impossible to imagine being awake forever, without ever going to sleep.
I don’t know if I will post regularly but I think that I will use this topic to share poems, even if few people are responding I just like sharing them and writing these posts, I was wondering if I should make a new topic with the title “Japanese Poetry Reading Club” or something like that… but for the moment I will just stay here.
I was reading a passage of How to Read a Japanese Poem from Steven D. Carter (really great book, I recommend it) where he was explaining the double meaning of this hokku from the Sarumino (猿蓑) :
物の音
一人たおるる
案山子かな
A sound, over there !
He has fallen all alone…
…the scarecrow
(I guess the kanji for たおるる is 倒るる. I took some freedom with “over there” and the punctuation.)
Mr. Carter explains in his book that despite the funny aspect of the poem it has a more deep and sad meaning, the loneliness of the wanderer hearing a sound and thinking it’s another person coming his way, only to be disappointed at the sight of the scarecrow (by the way I just realised why Kakashi-sensei in Naruto was named like that…).
That’s really one of the reasons that make me love japanese poetry, saying a lot in a few words and being implicit and subtle instead of explaining everything.
The pain of loneliness and disappointed hope is really a sour one, I guess the modern human has the same feeling when his phone rings and that he quickly grabs it with the anticipation of a message from a friend, only to see it’s just some random app notification.
I just wanted to let you know I really like this thread and the poems you share. There is one that I want to contribute as well at some point! It’s nice to have a calmer, slower moving thread 
I like the title of this thread, but just as a thought, if you wanted, you could just repurpose this one instead of swapping threads? Like, you can completely change the title and home post to make it more what you want and what this has become, and just put anything older for context in a drop down for future reference.
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.
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.
Why does any word mean what it means? In the end they’re arbitrary correspondences of sound and meaning. Classical Japanese has two “past tense” auxiliary verbs, and the distinction of meaning that they came to have between them by the Heian era was that き was past events one had directly experienced, and けり was hearsay past.
PS: the 見 kanji is “to see”, not “eye” (which is 目).
Classical Japanese has two “past tense” auxiliary verbs, and the distinction of meaning that they came to have between them by the Heian era was that き was past events one had directly experienced, and けり was hearsay past.
Very useful to know, thanks
PS: the 見 kanji is “to see”, not “eye” (which is 目).
I think I was very distracted when I wrote that of course it means “see” ! I will edit my post right now
Thank you for your answer !
A waka about impermanence, the 933th of the Kokinshû, first poem of the Book 18 :
世の中は
何か常なる
飛鳥川
昨日の淵ぞ
今日は瀬になる
yo no naka wa
nani ka tsune naru
asukagawa
kinô no fuchi zo
kyô wa se ni naru
In this world,
is there anything eternal ?
The Asuka River
yesterday a deep water
is today a shallow stream.
常なる < 常なり : permanent, unchanging, eternal
飛鳥川 : Asuka river ; I’ve read that asu can be a way of saying 明日, tomorrow. This river can also be found in other poems of the anthology.
淵 : deep water, abyss, deep pool
瀬 : rapid, shallow, current
I think the difficulty of this waka resides in the two なる who can be confusing when we read them the first time. The first is apparently a “pseudo-adjective” (I have also seen them referred to as “adjectival verbs”), the classical equivalent of the modern -na and -to adjectives.
From what I’ve seen, there are 2 types of them, the -nari and -tari. Here we have a なり pseudo-adjective in its rentaikei form, なる. I’ve also read about a new grammar point, the kakarimusubi rule that applies here I believe ? I’ve read in the book of Hellen Craig McCullough that there are 5 particles concerned by this rule, and か and ぞ are two of them. They are both in medial position, so the final inflected form in the sentence is a rentaikei (here, the two なる) ?
It’s still confusing for me, but for the first I find it easier to understand if we get that なり is the contraction of に有り. It’s clearly not the same meaning that the second なる at the end where we know that, because of the に, に なる means “to become”. I had some hesitations for the translation of the last line, I was wondering if I should write “has became, today, a shallow stream” or “has became a shallow stream” but I didn’t want too many syllables while still including “today”. So I chose to write “is today a shallow stream”, it still suggests the idea of change. I hesitated also about the translation of the kanji, perhaps I should have written “has became a rapid” or something like that… but I think “shallow stream” is also a good way to describe it. The 4th line too can be written differently, but here I have seven syllables and I prefer “deep water” rather than “deep pool”.
Like always, please correct me if I made any mistakes, all of this is still very hard for me.
The river in general is often used to describe impermanence, just like in the beginning of the very sad and beautiful Hôjôki (方丈記). It’s a very striking, moving and obvious metaphor, like in the poem 836 where Mibu no Tadamine, saddened by the death of his sister, evokes the impossibility to keep someone alive just like we would create a dam to stop the water from going away. The 837th positions himself in the echoes of it while putting in emphasis the fact that water flows in only one direction, and that it’s impossible to make it come back.
A reminder that all the waka of this masterpiece were carefully arranged in a precise order to create bridges between them, just like the 71th in the Book 2 that answers directly the interrogation of the 70th.
This poem has some parts that were hard for me, it’s the 83th :
桜花
とくちりぬとも
思ほえず
人の心ぞ
風もふきあへぬ
To put context, Ki no Tsurayuki has wrote it as an answer to someone saying that nothing scatters as fast as the cherry blossoms.
At the second line, I’ve read that ちりぬ is the ren’yôkei of chiru + the shûshikei of the auxiliary verb nu ? The nu puts here emphasis on the fact that the flowers are scattering very fast (toku) ?
I am quite unsure about the tomo. I’ve read it can be used after a fact that we take in an hypothetical way, to use this fact for saying something else. So here it would be “the cherry flowers scatter very fast” (lines 1 and 2) ; but the author of the poem disagrees (思ほえず)… but if I read the poem without knowing the context first, I don’t know if I would have understand that he means “I don’t think that nothing scatters as fast as cherry flowers”. I guess Ki no Tsurayuki don’t think that cherry flowers scatter slowly, he just think that the human heart scatter/change faster. But I don’t see where that nuance is written.
The last line was also hard to understand. I’ve read a translation of the poem where it was saying “even before the wind…” but I couldn’t understand where did that came from. But apparently, mo as an adverbial particle can follow a noun and put emphasis (so that’s the “even” in english). And I’ve read somewhere (I forgot to save the link, sorry) that あへぬ is an auxiliary that can be put with a verb and gives the meaning that the action is not finished. But I still don’t know what is the basic form of that あへぬ, where does that come from. And I am not sure if that means “the action is not totally over” or “the action has not even began”.
The advantage to read difficult poems is that you appreciate more the easier ones, like this haiku written by Matsuo Bashô :
様々の
事思い出す
桜かな
samazama no
koto omoidasu
sakura kana
They make me remember
so many different things,
the cherry flowers…
Winter is slowly arriving at its end… just a few weeks to wait before the full bloom of the cherry trees 
If anyone can help with the poem 83 I would really appreciate it, I am not totally sure about my understanding of it and still don’t see the origin of that strange あへぬ 
I believe the とく is 疾く, and the ぬ is indeed an auxiliary verb meaning てしまう.
I interpreted the とも思ほえず bit as とも思えない. So in more modern Japanese, the first half might look something like this:
桜花がそんなに速く散ってしまうとも思えない
I think that that nuance is in the contrast between the first half, in which says that he doesn’t think cherry blossoms scatter that quickly, and the immediate comparison using the emphasis ぞ, which in this case becomes something like こそ.
This is basically a counterexample to the person who said “Nothing scatters as fast as cherry blossoms,” by saying that people’s hearts change before the wind even stops blowing (and thus before the blossoms have finished scattering).
From what I can see, the basic form of あへぬ is 敢ふ, which as you said when put in the negative form becomes something like ～きれない.
Putting this together with the first half, it becomes something like this：
桜花がそんなに速く散ってしまうとも思えない
だって人の心こそ風も吹く間に（変わるもの）
I know that absolutely defiles the beauty of the poem, but that’s how I interpreted it (with help of online resources).
Besides your commentary and some internet searching, I’m not very familiar with the poem, so I’d take my rendering with a grain of salt.
I still don’t understand the role of とも here. Does it put emphasis on the negation ?
That’s also how I understand it. But I think I was just confused when I saw 疾く. I didn’t know if I should understand it as “SO fast” or only “fast”. But the only coherent meaning is “I can’t believe/don’t think that the cherry flowers scatter so fast”. Because it’s impossible to think they scatter/change slowly. For the author they just don’t scatter that quickly when we compare them to human hearts, like you said. And the second part of the poem is indeed essential to understand that.
It looks coherent, it’s attached to the verb 吹き, and I believe the も before is the “even” that I’ve read in the translation of Hellen Craig McCullough.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer
Yes, I believe that’s the role of it. In general I see ～とも思えない quite a bit, but of course I was just making a small assumption that the classical structure would be the same.
I can’t find the full translation, but that translator seems pretty famous and the も reasoning checks out for me.