Brooks on Lady Kasa

MYS 0597-0600
As Translated by: E Bruce Brooks (2002)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

[The portions of these translations corresponding to the thematic line "koi-wataru ka mo" in Lady Kasa's set of twenty-four poems are here shown in red for easier technical comparison].

MYS 0597 (#11)
(5 + 7 / + 5 + 7 + 7, unrhymed)

With conventional
people's eyes now everywhere,
For you, though as near
as across some bridge of stone,
I suffer this love-longing

MYS 0598 (#12)
(5 + 7 / + 5 + 7 + 7, unrhymed)

Of love-sickness too
people do sometimes perish -
Like a drying stream,
my heart wastes ever thinner,
by month, by day, by moment

MYS 0599 (#13)
(5 + 7 / + 5 + 7 + 7, unrhymed)

In some morning mist
our meeting might have happened -
And for that one glimpse,
til now it threatens my life,
I suffer this love-longing

MYS 600 (#14)
(5 + 7 + 5 / + 7 + 7, unrhymed)

The Sea of Ise
beats upon the rocky shore
with its crashing waves -
And for one no less awesome
I suffer this love-longing

The poet does not loop her stanzas together into a logical argument; she beats with them, one at a time, against the bars of her isolation. Now it is the prying eyes of ordinary people that keep them from a meeting, near as they are to each other (#11). Now it is the unreality of their previous meeting that makes a second meeting illusory (#13). Now it is the exalted status of her lover that separates them (#14). She pauses a little at that last thought (notice the downward shift of the caesura), which may indeed be the nearest to the truth of the matter. What is constant for her is not their present separation, which she construes in various ways, or their future together, which she cannot envision at all, but her longing for him, growing out of one meeting in the past (#12-13), and consuming her.

Or so it seems on the present reading. It is something of a confirmation to discover, in Yakamochi's two poems to her, that he too was grieved, but that they both should have known, from the beginning, that the thing was hopeless.

 

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