friday poetry blogging

[coraa]

By 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.)

Comments

[larryhammer]

And there was a long tradition of writing in Chinese dating back to, well, when Japan first imported writing from China. My understanding is that it was done less and less after the classical period, and what there was, was more predominately prose than poetry.

Which makes an 18th century kanshi interesting.

---L.