When His Majesty commanded that poems be composed, he offered the following:
春日野のわかなつみにやしろたへの袖ふりはへて人のゆくらん
| kasuga no no wakana tumi ni ya sirotaFe no sode FuriFaFete Fito no yukuran |
To the fields of Kasuga To gather fresh herbs, All in white, Sleeves aflutter, Do the girls go? |
Ki no Tsurayuki
紀貫之
Why the Provided Translation Missed the Mark:
Overly Specific (“girls”): Classical waka rarely genders subjects explicitly.
Lost Symbolism: “White hemp sleeves” carry ritual significance, not just color.
Flattened Speculative Mood: The original is wistful, not declarative.
Thank you for your comment and critique of the translation.
You are, of course, correct that waka rarely genders subjects explicitly and the word Fito here simply means ‘person’. However, the lack of explicit gender marking does not mean that it is not implied and that a particular gender would not have been inferred by the original audience for the poem. In this case, as Fito is frequently used in Love poetry to mean ‘woman’, I feel that ‘girls’ is an acceptable translation, given the mood of the poem with the (male) poet observing from afar. SirotaFe no / sode (‘white hempen / sleeves’) is a multilayered image with different layers of meaning and potential interpretations: a ritual significance here is certainly possible, as you say, but at this point in waka history, sirotaFe no was a centuries-old conventionalised descriptive epithet (makura kotoba) and so it could also be being used by Tsurayuki as a piece of convenient filler in his poem. Alternatively, given that it could also be used to convey a sense of femininity, due to white hempen cloth’s usage for women’s clothing, he could be using it to emphasise to his audience that it was, indeed, a group of women the poet was observing. I accept that I may have not got the tone quite right – I will rethink the final wording.