(The increasingly less) Daily senryu thread

You’re right, we’ve definitely got 「<noun> を <noun> とする」so I think this article gives plenty of good examples.

石油(せきゆ)原料(げんりょう)とする製品(せいひん) means “products that use petroleum as raw material”.

EDIT: corrected below:

So I still believe our phrase (臨終を旅立ちとする人) means “people departing on their deathbed” or “people departing at their last moment”.

<石油>         を  <原料>              とする  <製品>
<petroleum>       <raw-material>     [use]  <products> 
"products using petroleum as raw material"

<臨終>         を  <旅立ち>            とする  <人>
<last-moment>     <departure>        [do]   <person>
"people doing last-moment as departure"
or "people departing at their last moment"

The definition I’m using for 臨終 is 死に際 (the “edge” of death, but we’d say the “instant” of death).

The definition I’m using for 旅立ち is 門出(かどで) or “departure”.

Then it adds の知恵(ちえ). The definition that seems most applicable to me is 物事を考え. An applicable example would be:

知恵がある be resourceful; be full of ideas

Putting it all together, “people departing on their deathbed are full of ideas” or “people departing at their last moment are full of ideas”.

EDIT: And yes, this example needs a sentence diagram! :laughing:

臨終を旅立ちとする人の知恵

りんじゅうを・たびだちとする・ひとのちえ

The wise treat
death as start of
a journey

  • 3-4-3 translation
  • As I read it, the literal meaning seems to be: The wisdom of people who treat their death as a departure on a (new) journey.
3 Likes

I just don’t think that とする can mean ‘do’. “Using their last moment as a departure”, yes, if you like (though that’s a bit mystical for my taste), but not “doing a departure”. The grammar point is all about using X as something, with X as something, etc, and the する in it is fully occupied being part of the grammatical structure and cannot do double duty in its ordinary meaning of ‘to do’.

Ah! You’re right, I swapped the two nouns accidentally. My confusion was they both mean roughly the same thing. (I corrected it above.)

I still think my overall interpretation is correct. The humor comes from so many “famous last words”.

I think we’re getting to the heart of why we disagree on sentence diagrams. “Do” is a poor substitute above, but I don’t think there’s an exact English verb that works any better — it’s just a placeholder for a rough sense of action. “Products that use petroleum as raw material” is also an imperfect translation but what would be better? It seems to me that any sense of する would work with this construction, just pick what works best in English.

In this case, the action seems to be “passing” or “departing” whether it’s “last-moment as departure/start-of-journey” or “departure as last moment”, but the former is definitely more correct for this sentence (as you point out).

I wonder what the set phrase is for people’s dying words? I suspect it might give us a clue as to whether or not my interpretation is correct.

[I wonder if this is related to death poems and tanka?]

I forgot to ask my family their opinion last night, and I need to do some yardwork today, so I’m going to let this one run for another day. Apologies.

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Yikes. Apologies, got caught up in other things again. There’s a strong possibility I may be heading to Japan for business sometime soon which may also affect my ability to keep a daily pace. Shouldn’t be a major issue, but wanted to let people know.


Previous senryu

  1. 臨終を旅立ちとする人の知恵
    りんじゅうを・たびだちとする・ひとのちえ
    The wisdom of / people who see death / as a journey

Notes:

  • Nobody in my family has replied to my question yet, so I’m still considering this one “pending”. Usually when they are slow to answer it means they are thinking. I’ll force my wife to answer when she finishes work.

  • I know the translation above is valid, but it still doesn’t seem very senryu-like to me and I worry it misses the intent. I still suspect “full of ideas” is more likely than “wisdom” and that this one is about 辞世(じせい) (death poems) or famous quotations from people on their deathbeds (like, “People sure seem to have a lot on their minds during their last moments!”).

Current senryu challenge

Volume: Seniors

  1. 猫に手を貸したいくらい今はひま

Hmm. Fairly simple kanji, at least. I’ve got an idea what it’s about, but I need to ponder this a bit.


Remember to please use the spoiler tag with your translation attempts! Also, please include the reading in kana with your submission.

Everyone is encouraged to participate, no matter your level! Questions and comments are as valued as translation submissions.

Please try not to be disappointed if your translation isn’t selected or if you disagree with the daily choice: the judge isn’t terribly consistent with his grading (and has awful taste!).
Online tools like dictionaries, sentence databases, and even AI translation engines are fair game and can be extremely helpful. Yomichan is particularly handy if you use the Chrome or Firefox browser. The 語源(ごげん)由来(ゆらい)辞典(じてん) is also an excellent resource for researching the etymology of various words and expressions.

Here are the links to the 356 Japanese originals (spoiler free) and to the the spreadsheet with all the upcoming senryu as well as the translations to date.

ねこにてを かしたいくらい いまはひま

Since the subject is “‘seniors” I take the speaker to be a bored retiree. I debated whether it was “the cat” (a cat the speaker already has) or “a cat” (a hypothetical cat), but I think what makes sense is the speaker is considering getting a cat as a way to keep themselves occupied- i.e., the desire is more about something to do than a particular fondness for cats.

These idle days
I want to take care of
A cat, perhaps

It’s never that easy. What am I missing?

4 Likes

猫に手を貸したい is a play on the common phrase/saying 猫の手も借りたい meaning to be very busy, so busy you’d accept help even from as useless an assistant as a cat..

7 Likes

So is the meaning more like I’m so bored I want to be the useless cat’s assistant”?

2 Likes

Yep, pretty much.

2 Likes

I do appreciate a good cat metaphor, as I have a house full of useless cat assistants

6 Likes

猫に手を貸したいくらい今はひま

ねこにてを・かしたいくらい・いまはひま

Freed at last to / wish to lend the cats / a helping hand

Idle enough / to wish to lend cats / a helping hand

  • 4-5-4 version. Sorry for trying to drag Martin Luther King into a senryu translation, but couldn’t resit.
  • Literal translation would be “I have so much leisure now, with time enough to lend my cats a helping hand.”
  • The writer’s wish goes against the nature of cats, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s the senryu point? That the writer has so much time that he wants to meddle in affairs he shouldn’t? i.e. “Danger Ahead! Ya gonna get scratched!!”

EDIT: Better still, using @pm215 's linked ことわざ explanation, the writer, in their retired life, feels as useless as a cat assistant, enough to be a helper even to that useless cat, and “Idle,” borrowed from @weaverZ’s version, which is more ひま-like.

3 Likes

I’m also a cat person. But an extra like for the Machinery’s handbook.

2 Likes

ねこにてを かしたいくらい いまはひま

bored enough now
that i would help out
even a cat

Definitely one where I needed pm215’s hint in order to figure it out, haha :sweat_smile:. I debated a bit with what to do with ひま and ended up going with “bored” because “idle”, “free”, etc. didn’t quite seem to capture the right feeling here. It’s idleness in excess to such a degree that the person is looking to do basically the opposite of the set phrase.

6 Likes

Wednesday, September 14, 2022


Previous senryu

  1. 猫に手を貸したいくらい今はひま
    ねこにてを・かしたいくらい・いまはひま
    bored enough now / that i would help out / even a cat

Notes:

Good team effort on this one. This one also gets a gold star in the top post.

Thanks in particular to @pm215’s explanation for the expression 猫の手も借りたい. I’d not heard that one before.

I find the grammar in this one interesting. In particular, the は particle at the end seems particularly “Japanesey”.

If I were saying this in a conversation, I’d almost certainly have used の instead. I don’t think it would change the overall meaning, but the は imparts a slightly different nuance, I think.

Grammar discussion. WARNING: contains diagrams — but it's worth it!

The first two stanzas (12 (おん)) of this senryu consists entirely of what I’ve been calling “modifiers” (there is probably a better linguistic-grammarian word for this). They explain just how bored/idle the author is currently.

The most interesting bit to me is the final stanza: 「今はひま」.

As I mentioned, I’d have probably used の here instead of は. Using the latter seems extremely Japanese to me, so I want to explain my understanding. Let’s explore:

I initially interpreted this poem as being about boredom (I know what you’re thinking — bear with me).

I thought it was fair to assume that the final word was 名詞(めいし) (a noun). Specifically, the noun (ひま) (which can also be a だ-type 形容詞(けいようし), an adjective, but here it definitely seems to be a simple noun).

I think the only possible way to interpret this senryu is as a sentence fragment, much like the one about the (はな)ピアス in a train station a few months ago. It’s a poem about a noun, but it’s not a complete sentence because there is no predicate (no action).

Since a noun without a verb isn’t a complete thought (it’s not a sentence) I thought it also fair to assume the poem is about the mere existence of that noun. Exactly as with the other senryu about the 鼻ピアス, I thought the “core” sentence implied by this senryu was:

Because my weird western brain thought this was the implied “core” sentence (incorrectly as we’ll see), I wanted to interpret this as 今の暇, or “now’s boredom/idleness” (more colloquially, “my boredom right now”). This form uses the possessive の to act like a label-maker: using one noun as a “label” to modify another.

The word (いま) can either be a 名詞 or a 副詞(ふくし) (adverb).

Here’s how I’d diagram the sentence if it actually used の instead of は:

But the senryu actually uses the particle は, not の. The は in 「今はひま」 acts as a topic marker here (it’s not a “contrastive は”, it’s a real honest-to-goodness topic marker).

The topic of 「今はひま」 is now. Further, thanks to the magic zero pronoun, the subject of this sentence is NOW, not boredom!

Read that again: THE SUBJECT OF THIS SENTENCE (AND THIS POEM) IS NOW, NOT BOREDOM!

That is, the final stanza uses an implied だ as a copula. It’s an “A is B” sentence, not an “A does B” sentence like 「今の暇 [が] [ある]」.

Thus, I believe the diagram for the entire senryu is as follows:

You would read this diagram as follows:

  1. The “core” is on the horizontal lines, you would read it aloud as 「今は暇 [だ]」.

  2. The zero particle (“it” in this case) is still the subject conceptually, but because the topic is explicit we don’t need to read it aloud, we can simply read いま instead。

  3. Adding the first level of modifiers, we’d read this as: 「今は貸したいくらい暇 [だ]」.

  4. Adding the final level of modifiers, we end up with the complete sentence: 「猫に手を貸したいくらい今はひま」.

I have to say that this feels like a sweet payoff after several weeks of struggle. I’ve been trying to figure out how to show how my brain parses Japanese sentences. This is a pretty nuanced discussion. It would have been almost impossibly difficult to explain without diagrams! (I’m no Cure Dolly nor Jay Rubin.)

Thoughts? Comments? Corrections?

[EDIT: Follow-on commentary here with a diagram for the full version using の: Please help me create Japanese _sentence_ diagrams for beginners - #187 by Rrwrex]


Current senryu challenge

Volume: Hearfelt (しみじみ編)

  1. たったあれだけなのに母は嬉しそう

No hints today. I’m too worn out from all grammatical diagramming!


Remember to please use the spoiler tag with your translation attempts! Also, please include the reading in kana with your submission.

Everyone is encouraged to participate, no matter your level! Questions and comments are as valued as translation submissions.

Please try not to be disappointed if your translation isn’t selected or if you disagree with the daily choice: the judge isn’t terribly consistent with his grading (and has awful taste!).
Online tools like dictionaries, sentence databases, and even AI translation engines are fair game and can be extremely helpful. Yomichan is particularly handy if you use the Chrome or Firefox browser. The 語源(ごげん)由来(ゆらい)辞典(じてん) is also an excellent resource for researching the etymology of various words and expressions.

Here are the links to the 356 Japanese originals (spoiler free) and to the the spreadsheet with all the upcoming senryu as well as the translations to date.

[Separate reply because I don’t want to mess up anyone currently reading the grammar comment]

To net out the grammatical point: I think using は instead of の subtly emphasizes that it’s now that is boring instead of emphasizing boring on it’s own.

Does that make sense?

たったあれだけなのにはははうれしそう

It’s just a simple
thing, but mom looks
happy about it

i’ve got a 5-4-5 which uh, not the most poetic but since たった is just, あれ is something over there, だけ is making the あれ just again with a nuance of just this thing, along with のに even further cementing it as something the author doesn’t find that special.

It seems really easy but since it comes from heartfelt I don’t thing this one is meant to be too witty city.

5 Likes

I think you mailed it.

5 Likes

たったあれだけなのに母は嬉しそう

たったあれ・だけなのにはは・はうれしそう

Such a / trifle. Yet, mom’s / so glad

  • 2-4-2
  • ははは makes mom really 嬉しそう
4 Likes