Thank you for your comment. At the time this poem was written, ayame did not refer to the iris (Iris sanguinea) as it does now, but to a different plant, the sweet flag (Acorus calamus), hence the translation here is correct. The latter part of the poem is difficult to deal with: ayame 文目 is ‘pattern (on a piece of cloth)’, here used figuratively to mean ‘(logically) patterned thoughts’, so a literal translation would be ‘being in love [means] not understanding (i.e. losing) one’s reason/logic’. The anonymous poet has chosen this ayame, of course, to echo and build on the reference to the plant, so to convey the same effect, I could have said something like ‘all is flagged up to me / By this love!’ This sounded rather forced, though, so when I did the translation – more than twenty years ago now – I chose an English expression which conveys approximately the same sense. Thinking about it now, I might revise the translation to:
A cuckoo
Singing! Summer
Sweet flags:
I missed all the signs and
Fell in love!
Alternatively, I could ignore the poem’s central wordplay and go for:
A cuckoo
Singing! Summer
Sweet flags:
I have lost all reason and
Fell in love!
I think this translation is not correct.
where “iris”? (Ayame)?
and love blind the eyes.
Thank you for your comment. At the time this poem was written, ayame did not refer to the iris (Iris sanguinea) as it does now, but to a different plant, the sweet flag (Acorus calamus), hence the translation here is correct. The latter part of the poem is difficult to deal with: ayame 文目 is ‘pattern (on a piece of cloth)’, here used figuratively to mean ‘(logically) patterned thoughts’, so a literal translation would be ‘being in love [means] not understanding (i.e. losing) one’s reason/logic’. The anonymous poet has chosen this ayame, of course, to echo and build on the reference to the plant, so to convey the same effect, I could have said something like ‘all is flagged up to me / By this love!’ This sounded rather forced, though, so when I did the translation – more than twenty years ago now – I chose an English expression which conveys approximately the same sense. Thinking about it now, I might revise the translation to:
A cuckoo
Singing! Summer
Sweet flags:
I missed all the signs and
Fell in love!
Alternatively, I could ignore the poem’s central wordplay and go for:
A cuckoo
Singing! Summer
Sweet flags:
I have lost all reason and
Fell in love!