The Romance of the Milky Way | Page 8

of ancient Japanese poems, treating of the Tanabata legend. All are
from the Many[=o]sh[=u]. The Many[=o]sh[=u], or "Gathering of a
Myriad Leaves," is a vast collection of poems composed before the
middle of the eighth century. It was compiled by Imperial order, and
completed early in the ninth century. The number of the poems which it
contains is upwards of four thousand; some being "long poems"

(naga-uta), but the great majority tanka, or compositions limited to
thirty-one syllables; and the authors were courtiers or high officials.
The first eleven tanka hereafter translated were composed by
Yamagami no Okura, Governor of the province of Chikuzen more than
eleven hundred years ago. His fame as a poet is well deserved; for not a
little of his work will bear comparison with some of the finer epigrams
of the Greek Anthology. The following verses, upon the death of his
little son Furubi, will serve as an example:--
Wakakeréba Nichi-yuki shiraji: Mahi wa sému, Shitabé no tsukahi
Ohité-tohorasé.
--[As he is so young, he cannot know the way.... To the messenger of
the Underworld I will give a bribe, and entreat him, saying: "Do thou
kindly take the little one upon thy back along the road."]
Eight hundred years earlier, the Greek poet Diodorus Zonas of Sardis
had written:--
"Do thou, who rowest the boat of the dead in the water of this reedy
lake, for Hades, stretch out thy hand, dark Charon, to the son of
Kinyras, as he mounts the ladder by the gang-way, and receive him.
For his sandals will cause the lad to slip, and he fears to set his feet
naked on the sand of the shore."
But the charming epigram of Diodorus was inspired only by a
myth,--for the "son of Kinyras" was no other than Adonis,--whereas the
verses of Okura express for us the yearning of a father's heart.
* * * * *
--Though the legend of Tanabata was indeed borrowed from China, the
reader will find nothing Chinese in the following compositions. They
represent the old classic poetry at its purest, free from alien influence;
and they offer us many suggestions as to the condition of Japanese life
and thought twelve hundred years ago. Remembering that they were
written before any modern European literature had yet taken form, one
is startled to find how little the Japanese written language has changed

in the course of so many centuries. Allowing for a few obsolete words,
and sundry slight changes of pronunciation, the ordinary Japanese
reader to-day can enjoy these early productions of his native muse with
about as little difficulty as the English reader finds in studying the poets
of the Elizabethan era. Moreover, the refinement and the simple charm
of the Many[=o]sh[=u] compositions have never been surpassed, and
seldom equaled, by later Japanese poets.
As for the forty-odd tanka which I have translated, their chief attraction
lies, I think, in what they reveal to us of the human nature of their
authors. Tanabata-tsumé still represents for us the Japanese wife,
worshipfully loving;--Hikoboshi appears to us with none of the
luminosity of the god, but as the young Japanese husband of the sixth
or seventh century, before Chinese ethical convention had begun to
exercise its restraint upon life and literature. Also these poems interest
us by their expression of the early feeling for natural beauty. In them
we find the scenery and the seasons of Japan transported to the Blue
Plain of High Heaven;--the Celestial Stream with its rapids and
shallows, its sudden risings and clamourings within its stony bed, and
its water-grasses bending in the autumn wind, might well be the
Kamogawa;--and the mists that haunt its shores are the very mists of
Arashiyama. The boat of Hikoboshi, impelled by a single oar working
upon a wooden peg, is not yet obsolete; and at many a country ferry
you may still see the hiki-funé in which Tanabata-tsumé prayed her
husband to cross in a night of storm,--a flat broad barge pulled over the
river by cables. And maids and wives still sit at their doors in country
villages, on pleasant autumn days, to weave as Tanabata-tsumé wove
for the sake of her lord and lover.
* * * * *
--It will be observed that, in most of these verses, it is not the wife who
dutifully crosses the Celestial River to meet her husband, but the
husband who rows over the stream to meet the wife; and there is no
reference to the Bridge of Birds.... As for my renderings, those readers
who know by experience the difficulty of translating Japanese verse
will be the most indulgent, I fancy. The Romaji system of spelling has

been followed (except in one or two cases where I thought it better to
indicate the ancient syllabication after the method adopted