friday poetry blogging
Jul. 3rd, 2010 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaBy the monk and poet Ryokan.
Translated by Steven Carter:
It's all I think of: of when I was young,
reading books in the empty temple hall
—refilling the lamp again and again with oil,
never lamenting the long winter night.
Or, in the original:
一思少年時
読書在空堂
灯火数添油
未厭冬夜長
(Edit:lnhammer points out that it's interesting that the second is in Chinese, which is interesting since Ryokan is Japanese. I don't know if it was originally written in Chinese, or if my source is a translation of a translation, but it is interesting.)
Translated by Steven Carter:
It's all I think of: of when I was young,
reading books in the empty temple hall
—refilling the lamp again and again with oil,
never lamenting the long winter night.
Or, in the original:
一思少年時
読書在空堂
灯火数添油
未厭冬夜長
(Edit:
lnhammer points out that it's interesting that the second is in Chinese, which is interesting since Ryokan is Japanese. I don't know if it was originally written in Chinese, or if my source is a translation of a translation, but it is interesting.)