The emotions that leap from these fragments of verse are startling in their modernity. But they were written 1200 years ago in eighth-century Japan.
They are in From the Morning of the World, poems from the Manyoshu, the first anthology of poetry in Japanese, translated by Graeme Wilson (Harvill, 1991).
WINTER WAITING
Is he back? Is he back? I asked them:
No-one seemed to know.
~
I ran outside to look for him
As fast as I could go,
Into an empty courtyard
And the sibilance of snow.
~
Anonymous (eighth century)
DEAR LADY
You seem, dear lady, to have been
Living in Eternity.
~
Where but in that Timeless Land,
Could you thus have grown to be
More young than when, long years ago,
Last you deign to dazzle me?
~
Otomo no Miyori (died 774)
BAMBOO FENCE
The fence, I said, may need repair:
New bindings, fresh bamboo.
I’ll just go down and check, I said,
What one may need to do.
~
That’s what I said. I went, of course,
In hope of seeing you.
Otomo no Yakamochi (718-785)
FRINGED PINKS
That I might not forget her
This lonely autumntide,
The fringed pinks which she planted
In the beds on either side
Of the stone-paved walk are all in bloom
As though she had not died.
Otomo no Yakamochi (718-785)
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