2 thoughts on “KKS XI: 469”

    1. 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!

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