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Saturday, July 6, 2013

HEIAN POET ONO NO KOMACHI: MY TRANSLATIONS TO ENGLISH



Falling, the long rain,
the color from the flower,
the eye through the world.

I'm as happy with this translation of Komachi as a poem in English as I am with any of mine.  I wrote it after reading two or three other translations.  One of them--Rexroth's?--had something about the watching eye falling through the world.  As I read more translations and commentaries, there was nothing else much like it.  So thought perhaps my version drew on a rather dubious source.  However, I've just found that the Japanese word nagame, here translated as "long rain," can also mean "to watch."  So--dubious no more, and I'm happy again. 




Should the stream whisper come,
like a severed reed,
I would float away,
adrift as my heart.



Moonlight pouring through the trees
fills me up with autumn.

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