The Romance of the Milky Way | Page 8

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:--
Wakaker��ba Nichi-yuki shiraji: Mahi wa s��mu, Shitab�� no tsukahi Ohit��-tohoras��.
--[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.
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--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-tsum�� 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-fun�� in which Tanabata-tsum�� 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-tsum�� wove for the sake of her lord and lover.
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--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 by Aston); and words or phrases necessarily supplied have been inclosed in parentheses.
Amanogawa Ai-muki tachit��, Waga ko?shi Kimi kimasu nari Himo-toki mak��na!
[He is coming, my long-desired lord, whom I have been waiting to meet here, on the banks of the River of Heaven.... The moment of loosening my girdle is nigh![7]]
[Footnote 7: The last line alludes to a charming custom of which mention is made in the most ancient Japanese literature. Lovers, ere parting, were wont to tie each other's inner girdle (himo) and pledge themselves to leave the knot untouched until