Ice Melts in the Wind: The Seasonal Poems of the Kokinshu

Contents

Introduction

Book I. Spring 1 (1–68)

Book II. Spring 2 (69–134)

Book III. Summer (135–168)

Book IV. Autumn 1 (169–248)

Book V. Autumn 2 (249–313)

Book VI. Winter (314–342)

Index of Poets

Also by the Translator

For Janni

Warblers in snowfall,

geese going and returning,

crickets chirping low:

all these words, borrowed and mine,

are yours through every season.

Introduction

The Kokinshu

The Kokinwakashū (Old and New Japanese Poems Collection), or Kokinshu for short, was the first imperially commissioned anthology of poetry written in Japanese. Compiled around 905 C.E. by a committee of four courtiers appointed by Emperor Daigo, it contains 1111 poems arranged in 20 thematic books. Over the previous century, there’d been three imperial collections of poetry written in Chinese, the prestige language of the continent, but tastes had since shifted enough that it was possible to officially admit poems in Japanese were just as good—and the editors set out to showcase the best.

The result was an enormous success: the Kokinshu became a cultural touchstone, defining the acceptable topics, diction, imagery, and to a large degree the style and tenor of Japanese court poetry for the next thousand years. Twenty further imperial anthologies followed its model over the next six centuries, developing its patterns of progression and association into the principles of linked renga verse. The haiku poets also took many of their cues from it, including giving primacy to seasonal imagery. The creation of other formal poetic registers, especially those of modern poetry, meant breaking down the conventions of the previous millennium.

At the time, however, the Kokinshu was more important as a sustained argument for a poetic mode that almost any aristocrat could, with training, use to write a competent poem. And write they did, for all sorts of social occasions, to friends and lovers, in competitions and in mourning, for fun and for earnest, using a graceful courtier’s manner that is almost possible to translate adequately—especially in comparison to later refinements in allusion, indirection, and depth. Wit was prized as much as emotion, with both equally held to standards of decorum. This decorum also placed bounds on acceptable subjects and tones—this is especially marked compared to the wide range of poetry written two centuries earlier, collected in the Man’yoshu. But within those bounds, there is richness indeed.

The Japanese preface by lead editor Ki no Tsurayuki (there is a second preface in Chinese written by a relative) is also important as the first essay in Japanese poetic criticism, classifying the poetic modes of the day and setting standards for judging poems. Although Tsurayuki was influenced by Chinese literary criticism, he lay out what he considered was distinctive about Japanese poetics, starting with an opening sentence that used imagery completely alien to Chinese commentary: Japanese poetry takes the human heart as its seed, and has innumerable words as its leaves. Tsurayuki names two poets as the best of Japan’s past, and then praises and criticizes the works of six recent poets of note, who have been known ever since as the Six Poetic Geniuses.

Broadly speaking, the Kokinshu is organized in two halves each headed by the two most important topics—six books of seasonal poems and five books of love poetry, respectively—followed by various smaller genres: birthday felicitations, farewells, travel poems, and acrostic verse in the first half, elegies, miscellaneous topics, miscellaneous forms, and ritual songs in the second. All but nine poems are in the form now called tanka. Around 450 poems are listed as author unknown, though some authors are known through other sources, with the rest attributed to 130 or so named poets, almost all active in the 9th century.

Within each topical book, care was taken with the sequencing: the seasonal poems follow the calendar year, the love poems describe the general course of a courtly love affair, the travel poems are arranged by distance from the capital of Kyoto, and so on. Within these broad structures there are sub-sequences and sub-plots, and sometimes smaller arcs. Above all, no schema was strictly held to if a different order proved more fruitful—to avoid predictability, vary rhythms or sentence structures, or bring two poems together in conversation. Furthermore, the editors didn’t use all the best material that their disposal—some of the better poems of the time were left out, to be picked up by later anthologies, because they did not fit the arrangement.

In short, the editors worked to make the Kokinshu a delight to read.

This Translation

This collection contains the complete first six books of the Kokinshu, 342 poems depicting the seasonal progression from New Year’s Day through spring cherry blossoms and summer cuckoo songs to autumn’s colorful leaves and winter snow, ending with the New Year.

I’ve rendered my best understanding of the originals as English poetry, matching tonal and syntactic features wherever possible. The form mimics the original 31 syllables in lines of 5-7-5-7-7. In Japanese, however, this syllable count was not strict: hypermetric lines with an extra syllable were not uncommon, often but not always containing adjacent vowels that can be elided together. Sometimes, this was done to effect—a long last line gives it something of an emphasis. Based on this formal laxity, I’ve allowed myself the occasional line that’s a syllable short or, more rarely, long—never more than one a poem. I try to avoid padding my language to fill out the form, for that’s neither good poetry nor good translation, and any roundabout phrasings generally correspond to something of the original, be it tone or syntax or the poet being wordy—for indeed, not all poems have equally compressed language, and translations that streamline as much as possible can be unfaithful.

In any case, I hope I manage to convey something of why the Kokinshu influenced a millennium of Japanese culture.

Commentary is largely devoted to providing context, highlighting nuances, and noting possible alternate readings. The difficulties of translating Japanese have been frequently commented on; for classical Japanese, in addition to the usual decisions of what implied pronoun to understand or whether a noun is singular or plural, case-marking particles were much more readily dropped than in contemporary writing. Because of the form’s constraints, many key five-syllable nouns are especially prone to grammatical nakedness, leading to questions of whether a given mention of cherry blossoms are a verb’s subject, a direct object, direct address, or even an exclamation. I note such nouns on first appearance, so the reader can be aware of possible interpretations, but otherwise dwell on the matter only when it is particularly knotty. A translator’s difficulties should not be the occasion of the reader’s boredom.

All names have been silently regularized to the most common form used today. Romanizations use modern pronunciations. Parentheses around an author or topic indicates that it is absent in the original and so by convention carried over from the previous poem.

On Calendars

Until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the late 19th century, Japan used the Chinese lunisolar calendar, with months starting on the new moon. There were four three-month seasons, starting with spring. To keep the lunar cycle in synch with the solar year, leap-months were added as needed.

In parallel with this was a separate solar calendar, used mainly by the scholars responsible for calculating the leap-month or otherwise interested in astronomy. Its seasons didn’t start on the equinoxes or solstices, but were centered on them. Thus, solar spring began on what’s now 4 or 5 February and ran until the start of summer on 5 or 6 May, and so on.

As a result, the lunisolar months could be offset from the solar year by up to two weeks in either direction, and New Year’s Day could fall anywhere between 21 January and 20 February.

Most of the time, dates in the Kokinshu use the lunisolar calendar, but some astronomic events of the solar year appear.

Sources

My base text is the Japanese Text Initiative edition (http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/kokinshu/), with the following commonly accepted emendations: #82.1 koto for goto, #246.3 ni for o, and #259.2 koto for goto.

For information about the Kokinshu’s background and influence, as well as interpretations of individual poems, I am especially indebted to Hellen Craig McCullough’s study Brocade by Night. I consulted several modern Japanese commentaries, and found most helpful the Milord Club commentaries for interpretations and the Kokinwakashu Database for grammar assistance. Also useful were glosses in Kokin Wakashu: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry translated by McCullough, Kokinshu: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern translated by Rodd & Henkenius, Timothy Wixted’s A Handbook to Classical Japanese, Haruo Shirane’s Classical Japanese, Edwin Cranston’s The Grass of Remembrance, and Timothy McAuley’s Waka Poetry site. On a somewhat specialized topic, Lafcadio Hearn’s essay Insect-Musicians in Exotics and Retrospectives has a valuable rundown of the varieties of Japanese crickets and their cultural associations.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Matt Treyvaud, Francesca Forrest, and Andrea Horbinski for patient and helpful comments on draft translations.

Book I.

Spring 1 (1–68)

1. Ariwara no Motokata

Written when the first day of spring came in the old year.

I see solar spring

has arrived before New Years.

So what do we say—

that this time is still last year

or part of the year to come?

toshi no uchi ni

haru wa kinikeri

hitotose o

kozo to ya iwamu

kotoshi to ya iwamu

In the lunisolar calendar, spring the calendrical season started with New Year’s Day at the start of the First Month, falling roughly in Gregorian early February (where roughly encompasses plus-or-minus two weeks), while spring the astronomical season started on Risshun, falling on February 4 or 5. Somewhat less than half the time, the latter came before the former. There were several terms for the period between the two Beginnings of Spring, and the discrepancy was confusing enough that some wit could be squeezed out. The poem reads somewhat less laboredly in Japanese, in that of the four mentions of year, Motokata uses three different words—but only somewhat.

2. Ki no Tsurayuki

Written on the first day of spring.

The water I cupped

in my hands, drenching my sleeves,

has long been frozen—

today, with the start of spring,

will it melt in the wind?

sode hijite

musubishi mizu no

kōreru o

haru tatsu kyō no

kaze ya tokuramu

Tsurayuki was the sort of poet who could work several seasons into a small poem along with a learned allusion to a line from the Chinese Book of Rites and make it all sound lovely and unforced. Untranslatable wordplay: musubu, scoop up in cupped hands, can also mean tie together, as in fastening one’s clothing, and toku, melt, can also mean untie, and both words associate with sleeve to give an erotic overtone.

3. Author unknown

Topic unknown.

So where are they now,

the mists that rise in the spring?

Here in Yoshino,

beautiful Mount Yoshino,

the snow continues to fall.

harugasumi

tateru ya izuko

miyoshino no

yoshino no yama ni

yuki wa furitsutsu

Yoshino was the site of an imperial pleasure palace in the Nara period. It retained a reputation for beauty in later times and in poetry frequently appeared with the prefix mi-, meaning beautiful/delightful. The mist that rises as the world melts and warms is a sign of early spring in Japan. Speaking of which, harugasumi (spring mist/haze) exactly fills a five-syllable line, and thus it often appears in poetry without a case-marking particle, making it grammatically ambiguous. Here, it’s most likely the subject of rise but it can also be read as a direct address. I don’t use the traditional translations of haze for the spring kasumi and mist for autumnal kiri—instead, following a hint from Edwin Cranston, I render either word as mist when it refers to something being seen and haze when it’s being seen through. Just one example of how different languages don’t always slice semantic space in the same direction.

4. A poem on the beginning of spring by the Nijō Empress

Spring has indeed come,

though snow is still around us.

So will it be now

that the bush warbler’s teardrops,

long