Oh no worries I know there is a lot 
before posting I even hesitated a little thinking “maybe it’s too much” but then I thought “yes but what about this poem and this other one” “uhmmm I don’t want to have 11 or 13 poems, I like a “good” number like 7 or 14 so let’s go for 14” “folding screens are cool I want to talk about them” “hey these passages of the Essays in Idleness are great” and brick by brick I ended up with this wall of text 
Thank you for taking the time to read me 
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(mitrac I think you forgot to put your comment about the Spring post it’s alright though, happens to everyone)
I was thinking recently about the Moon, and her presence in Japanese poetry. Earlier in this thread I had translated a few Midaregami poems and mentioned very briefly a thesis that I had found online, written by Teppei Fukuda, about this anthology. Here is a direct quote from the abstract :
“In premodern Japan, poets had traditionally expressed their feelings through a set, limited range of classical landscapes and natural objects, which served as communal symbols Japanese poets shared across centuries. The seasons greatly occupied the attention of poets for more than a thousand years. The moon also is an important element in Japanese poetry with a set range of conventionalized poetic associations. However, by the turn of twentieth century, Yosano Akiko absorbed from the West the inspiration to express her personal feelings with her own invented moonlit landscapes, particularly ones set during spring and summer evenings. This thesis investigates what changes she made to the poetic conventions of the moon and the seasons in traditional thirty-one-syllable poetry.”
In the Chapter 1, “The Spring Moon in Tangled Hair”, we can find an interesting commentary about a super cute poem, one of the best in Midaregami in my opinion. Here is the original text with my translation, partly inspired by the one I’ve read in the thesis, with the commentary from Teppei Fukuda (what I quoted includes a brief part talking about another poem but I think it’s useful to understand what’s following). Usually I would also put my usual vocabulary/grammar notes but it happens that they are already in the commentary so, it would be a little redundant to do so.
みだれ髪 057 – 与謝野晶子
しのび足に君を
under the light pale moon
you don’t see me secretly
following you with your letters that I have
already read so heavy in
the right sleeve of my kimono
Commentary from the thesis
« […] Here is an example of a classical waka, composed by a female poet, Akazome Emon (956-1041), who lived one thousand years before Akiko.
やすらはで寝なましものをさ夜ふけてかたぶくまでの月を見しかな
(Akazome Emon, in Mostow 316)
Though I’d have preferred
to have gone off to bed
without hesitating,
the night deepened and
I watched the moon till it set!
(Mostow 316)
The female protagonist is perhaps, Akazome Emon herself. She is passively waiting for somebody under the moonlight. Regarding the romantic relationships in the Heian period, this woman’s action of waiting is something traditional in Japanese poetry, according to Sarah Strong: “a large number of women were placed in a position of waiting for their men, poems of tedium and longing were standard fare” (Strong 178). As the use of the moon in romantic longing poems in the Heian period shows, this passive action of waiting goes along with the melancholic thought, which is elicited by the moon. In other words, Heian women often waited under the moonlight for lover’s visits like in the poem above. In addition, there was a tradition that the moon should be considered to be the autumn moon unless a poem contains a word directly indicating a different season. Heian aristocratic women in waka poems were waiting for their lovers mostly under the autumn moon―a time of year when romance would fade.
The Modern Girl’s Pale Moon
Even though women in traditional waka poems usually take a position of waiting, Akiko’s female persona often act on their impulses: sometimes watching a man buying a present for his girl and thinking “that guy there is cute”; sometimes her poetic woman even chases a man she loves. For an example of the latter from Tangled Hair, Akiko’s female persona is not passively waiting for her man, instead she follows after him. In real life Akiko pursued Tekkan. The poem captures the excitement of young romance which though sometimes adventurous can be accompanied by immature hesitation. The moon here seems to inspire this young lover to go after what she wants, which would have been shocking to people living in the Meiji Period.
しのび足に君を追ひゆく薄月夜右のたもとの文がらおもき
(Yosano Akiko)
Following you
on foot stealthily
in this pale moon evening
So weighty, the letters already read
in my right sleeve.
One can see the complicated emotions of a young girl in love, such as hesitation and adventurous excitement. Together with poetic techniques such as hypermetric (ji-amari) lines Akiko’s diction amplifies this feeling, and this emotion is gently veiled and beautifully ornamented with the pale light of the moon.
Akiko’s diction often enriches the mood of the poem. In this poem, shinobi ashi (on foot stealthily) and fumigara (letters already read) are words that signal to the reader complicated and romantic feelings of the young girl in love. Shinobi ashi has a nuance that someone is following somebody sneakily, and the person following does not want the person followed to realize that he or she is following them. As he argues how Akiko’s statement of love was bold, Shinma tells the reader that even wife and husband hesitated to walk on the road together in the Meiji Period (Shinma 50). It was common for wives to walk a few steps behind men in traditional Japan. Shinobi ashi here tells us that Akiko’s girl persona desperately wants to be near the man she longs for. Fumigara means letters already read. Gara is used for something that has completed its mission, and about to be trashed and forgotten. However, here, Akiko’s poetic persona keeps fumigara in her right sleeve. Itsumi writes, “They were very important for the poet when she was young.” She adds: “The word ‘heavy’ indicates that these letters were mentally heavy for the poet” (Itsumi 66). Although readers might think that letters one can carry in one’s sleeve cannot be very heavy (omoki), Akiko’s female persona feels that the letters are heavy, not because of the physical weight, but for their psychological import. The poem’s final line gives us the sense that the letters are crucial for her in her pursuit of love.
Besides her unique choice of words, her intense emotional content is the key to interpreting all of Akiko’s poems. Her poems are usually so filled with emotion that they often exceed the limitation of beats of the tanka form (31 morae). Even though the first line of tanka usually is composed of 5 morae, the first line of this poem, shinobiashi ni has six morae. The complicated, romance-related hesitation, which is not strong enough to stop her from chasing the guy, is captured in this hypermetric line. According to Jon Holt, excessive (ji-amari) verses can be skillfully used by poets to either make the mood expansive or accentuate a passionate feeling. “These poems with excessive (ji-amari) verses have to break the bounds of thirty-one syllables because their lyric content is bursting at the seams” (Holt 343). He also mentions, “the excess beats can mimetically enhance the images of the poems, often in accentuating quantity expressions, making the mood more expansive, or accentuating a passionate feeling” (Holt 343-344). Akiko’s female persona here has a contradictory feeling of passion because on one hand she is hesitating to show her love, but on the other hand, she is tracking after him anyway. She is conflicted. One can see her complex emotions as she vacillates between hesitation and action. Akiko’s hypermetric line perfectly captures this deep complex emotion.
As mentioned earlier, Tangled Hair is a well-studied collection of tanka, and scholars widely differ on what to think of maidens that appear in the verses. Even in this poem, Itsumi Kumi contends that this poem captures the lively heart of a young girl. Sarah Strong, an American scholar, argues that Akiko’s poems changed the role of women in the waka tradition. Readers can easily imagine that sneakily chasing one’s love can create a certain type of excitement—for an immature girl or a mature woman. Along with the romantic excitement of following after a guy she loves, here, we can see an almost adventuresome feeling of hiding oneself while chasing somebody. Itsumi says, “It well captures the lively heart of a young girl. We can imagine a somehow thrilling and interesting scene.” (Itsumi 66). The girl is trying to keep her feelings inside of her as she is chasing her love. Perhaps the man realizes that she is following him, but the reader cannot really know what is going to happen. This situation gives some thrill to the verse. This thrill perhaps stimulates young girl’s passion and excitement. The girl in this poem is not just passively hiding her body and feelings from the lover, but actively chasing (oiyuku) him. In other words, she is hesitating to show that she loves him, but she physically and actively follows anyway. When one compares this with a female persona’s position of waiting in traditional waka poems mentioned by Sarah Strong, we can see that the female persona of this poem is modern.
The moon in Akiko’s poems sometimes enhances the poem with the combination of its unusual appearance and the rich emotions in the poem. The reader senses complex emotions of the protagonists and their relation to the image of the moon, here a thin, a hazy or a cherry moon as opposed to a generic moon. The pale moon night (usuzukiyo) illuminates the entire landscape of the poem and expands the romantic feeling. The moonlight emphasizes the exhilaration of the girl protagonist’s romantic feelings, as it helps her to hide from the man she is chasing. The pale moonlit night (usuzukiyo) gently illuminates the scene. The clouds or mists in the night sky blur the moonlight, and this misty pale moon gently veils Akiko’s female persona and her excitement of love. The usuzukiyo allows her to be more sneaky.
The pale moon night is somewhat ambiguous word as a seasonal word since some scholars consider it as a seasonal word of autumn, and others claim that it is a spring word. Because the moon itself is considered as a seasonal word for autumn in the waka tradition, some people argue that usuzukiyo is an autumn word. On the other hand, as mentioned above, usuzukiyo is associated with mists, which is the very thing that makes the moonlight pale. Since the misty moon (oborozukiyo) is used as a spring word from as early as The Tale of Genji (ca. 1000), some scholars categorize usuzukiyo as a seasonal word for spring. For instance, in The Names of the Moon (Tsuki no namae, 2012), a Japanese poet Takahashi Junko introduces usuzukiyo as a name of the spring moon along with other names for the moon associated with mists such as oborozuki, aburazuki, engetsu, and tangetsu (28). Considering the exhilarating mood of Akiko’s poem and the pale light helps her to secretly trail her love, it is not a mistake to take this moon as a misty spring moon. The role of the spring moon here, further amplifies the exhilarating feeling of a young girl’s romance. This use of the spring moon was something modern at the time in waka and tanka. »
– Fukuda, Teppei, “Moonlit Nights and Seasons of Romance: Yosano Akiko’s Use of the Moon in Tangled Hair” (2020). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 5580.
Personal notes about my translation
As you can see it is different from the ones I usually do ; I was inspired here by the translations of Laurel Rasplica Rodd who writes them with no punctuation marks and uses blank spaces to give a rhythm.
On the first line, I could have just written “under the pale moon” but I like the rhythm it gives to have a space between “light” and “pale”. It also does a play with the word “light” ; at first we think about the noun, the light, and then it turns out to be an adjective (but at the same time it’s still a noun, for the light emitted by the moon).
There is no indication of 夜 in my translation, because I couldn’t find a solution to make it fit in an interesting way, without too many syllables. It’s in these kind of moments that you realise how concise the Japanese language can be, with just three kanji to immediately describe a scene like that. But it doesn’t matter that much, since the moon is visible it’s clearly implied that it’s the night or evening (even though I admit that it can still be visible in other moments…).
The words “you don’t see me” are a personal touch. I could have just written “I’m secretly/discreetly following you” to follow more exactly the original text. Like it is said in the thesis we don’t know if the man actually knows that the woman is following him, but from the viewpoint of the writer it seems to me that the man doesn’t know. It’s the intention at least.
We also can’t be sure about how many letters the poetess is talking about when she writes 文がら. It could be just one, or five, seven, nine… おもき is describing a mental weight, not a material one. It’s interesting to think about the little nuance it can brings in the meaning : if it’s only one letter, it surely means that they haven’t been separated for too long ; but if we are talking about a number like seven, that probably means that it has been a very long time since they haven’t seen each other. So the plural noun can be interesting in that way, since we have to make a choice anyway ; we can’t translate in English this Japanese ambiguity. I have read so far three translations of this poem and only one wrote it singular.
And like you can see there are a lot of syllables in my translation, too much maybe but I think that the rhythm is still good, I like how it sounds at least. It’s the most important for me.
For the “usual” posts and especially the seasonal ones I like to post a lot of poems at the same time with a lot of cultural content, but I think it’s also nice sometimes to do smaller posts like this one 
Yes, I did forget to keep going! Here is how far I am, I’ll post as I go to keep the discussion going rather than wait for all comments. Then we can discuss as I read through it, or if there are no comments I’ll keep adding to this post
Comments (a start) on the spring edition
I had no idea about this, neat
buying 馬酔木 (雑誌)
I went down a little rabbit hole on this and found a couple options.
The first one is amazon but if you want to order more than once use a vpn, setting your location to Japan, otherwise in my experience the account gets closed after the first order (ie, you can make one order, then the next time you log on it cuts you off)
Amazon.co.jp
The second option I’ve used more often (no vpn and I prefer this over amazon). It’s Neokyo, a proxy where you can order items from different sellers, I found lots of copies from various markets on the Mercari and Rakuma by searching 馬酔木 (雑誌). They are probably used in this case but you can autotranslate the description and I order books that have the best photos and details for the price. All my experiences have been good, although one book smells strongly of mould. Just have a look first sometimes there is a promotion for one market or other, and if it’s your first order, which market has the best intro offer. I have a post somewhere with my experience, let me know if you’d like it
Neokyo
Great choice of music and video!
空蝉の世にも似たるか花ざくら咲くと見しまにかつ散りにけり
I like your translation choice with metamorphosis
I wonder, due to the にも and か, if the comparison is potentially even a surprise question / realisation - is our world even that transient (as the Sakura)?!
Literally: “Is it similar even to our world”
?
春ごとに花のさかりはありなめどあひ見む事はいのちなりけり
You’re right it does make a shock. To the extent that I wondered what such a poet would write in our time, when perhaps it’s not such a certainty that even the Sakura will boom
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I had no idea about that proxy seller 
thanks for that it seems like a good option, I think I also prefer doing this rather than taking the Amazon . jp route with the VPN. I’m not planning to buy them right now anyway, but it’s still useful to know a way to get them if I want to one day. I will try to remember at this moment to ask you for the post you wrote about your experience with it
Glad you liked it ! what an amazing game it is, an artistic masterpiece, even though the open world gets quite repetitive
Thank you, it’s these kind of situations that make translation an interesting hobby sometimes I think it’s precisely because how different Japanese and English are, it’s not as fun when languages are very close to each other.
For the にも, I am honestly not totally sure. But I am pretty confident in it. In these kind of situations I procede sometimes by elimination, I look at the lists of functions for each particle and I try to think about which one makes the most sense ? For me the に is to mark what comes before for a comparison, and the も seems to be here just for emphasis.
But I am on the other hand 100% sure about the か : it’s a meaning of exclamation, not interrogation. The poem is precisely used as an example in Shirane’s Grammar for the exclamation meaning of か and かな. And I’ve also read several other translations where it always was a meaning of exclamation rather than interrogation.
One way to be sure is to also look at the end, 散りにけり. Here is what Helen McCullough says in her Bungo Manual about one of the functions of the suffix けり :
“[…] It may indicate a feeling of surprise or wonder evoked by the speaker’s sudden awareness of a continuing condition or situation which he had not noticed before. […] English : exclamation point (often untranslatable). This is the usual meaning when keri occurs in Heian poetry.”
And this precise poem is cited as an example.
You mean that there could be a point where there are such huges environmental damages/changes that even the sakura wouldn’t bloom ? Maybe indeed, sometimes I also think about the potential of a cataclysmic disaster like a worldwide nuclear war, or an asteroid wiping out the Earth… and even if these things don’t happen, there will still be a point in billions years from now where this planet will be engulfed by the Sun anyway 
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Continuing my comments on the spring edition
Summary
This is my favourite one. I feel like this poem expresses my experience of spring blossoms perfectly
Thanks for that, I have wondered if the ‘reading’ was actually い.
I enjoy 一茶 and the ones you chose here
Incredible 
I wonder if you could find a tutor on italki who has an interest in classical japanese, poetry, haiku, etc, and if that person would be an interesting resource to reach out to a few times a year
Probably an hour on italki costs less than some of your books, and I bet someone Japanese with a shared interest could be a very useful resource…
I’ll continue with your next aside on the 白拍子［しらびょうし], I don’t want to rush this. Thanks for all the effort you put in!
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You’re welcome, thank you for taking the time 
Interesting coincidence that you’re saying this because I was precisely thinking these last weeks about taking some italki courses. I had my first conversation in Japanese at one of the stands of the Japan-Day (which was… underwhelming by the way, you didn’t miss anything incredible) and it was a really fun moment, I mean it was a veeery short conversation but the woman that I was talking to seemed so surprised and happy that I was trying to speak in her language (it was really noisy around us so I don’t remember if I got 上手ed but she said something close I think 
). I didn’t know how great of a feeling it can be, up to this point Japanese was a language that I had only read and listened to, so… But now I really want to practice speaking, especially since I want to visit Japan one day, and like you said these lessons can also be useful for talking about waka/haiku and all the intricacies of classical Japanese. I actually looked it up but from what I saw on italki a lot of teachers didn’t include “Japanese Literature” on the subjects they want to teach/talk about, I’ve managed to find one on another website, Preply, never heard of it before but it seems like a reliable platform. The teacher has excellent reviews and a master’s degree in Japanese literature so, right now I can’t but at some point in the near future I will take lessons with her, the price is also reasonable. It will be so great to be able to discuss about some of my favorite passages/poems, and to be able to ask questions instead of having a headache for hours…
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Thank you for making me feel better about it, I was just thinking the other day about it!
I’m glad you went, though! I hope it was worth it. It sounds like your conversation was inspiring, that’s great 
I have heard of Preply, that’s legit. An MS in Japanese literature - sounds like someone who might be up your alley! Will be looking forward to how that goes
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I was curious to see what it looks like so I’m glad that I have done it at least once (and that little discussion in Japanese at the calligraphy stand was cool) but I will probably not go back in the future, it felt quite disappointing to me, very… “cheap” unfortunately. It was also full of people, the Rheinpromenade but also the ImmermannstraBe were absolutely packed, on one hand it’s nice but on the other hand it feels like too much sometimes, you had to stand in line for everything and it felt really cramped in these narrow paths. I didn’t even try a restaurant in the Little Tokyo district because it was just too much, I’ve read really good reviews on these though. There are also a lot of beautiful things coming directly from Japan if I’m not mistaken in the Kyoto store, and the Takagi bookstore is cool too.
There were also a few beautiful cosplays and the concert and the fireworks were not too bad though, so there is that. And when you walk all along the Rheinpromenade there is a park at some point with a Japanese garden, nothing incredible but it was pretty. One thing that I also liked was the fact that there was a kind of “hidden” path leading to a really cramped but intimate space where you are surrounded by trees and foliages, I felt like a Heian aristocrat doing a secret meeting in his lover’s garden with all the snow in winter I wonder how the garden would look like.
But again nothing that really gave me that “Wow!” factor. And it might sound absurd to say that but the fact that there were a few carps in such a small pond gave me some kind of weird feeling, it almost feels a little-bit anxiety inducing in a sense, to think about these fishes spending all their lives rotating and rotating again in the same little space… but as humans we just can’t imagine what it feels like to be them, they are maybe happy like that 
But I was thinking at some point maybe I would feel more at ease and able to just lose myself in my thoughts if it was a garden without those carps, as stupid as it may seem I don’t know, maybe I will change my mind about that later, feelings are weird sometimes especially when these fishes are maybe just perfectly cool with their situation, chilling and vibing together lol
(damn, I wrote a whole novel again…)
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Thanks for the impressions! Sounds like something I’ll try in the off season someday. I know what you mean about having conflicting feelings for the koi. I wonder if it’s bigger than the koi pond in hannover’s Japanese garden. It seemed quite large to me for such a pond. I’ve only been once but I’d like to go back. Nice idea to go during different seasons
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