I know it's Japanese, but what does it say
From LibraryWiki
I know it's some kind of Japanese, but what does it say?
Here's an image of a poem written by Ukita Hideie, who was exiled to Hachijou-jima after fighting on the losing side in the great battle at Sekigahara, over 400 years ago. He wrote the poem for a monk who was leaving their island prison and returning to the mainland after being pardoned:
宇喜多秀家和歌（個人蔵）
It's not all that easy to read. Luckily, on the website where I found this image (Ukita Hideie Waka), there was also a version of the text transliterated into 活字:
- 武蔵野は
- 行ども あきの
- 終ぞなき
- いかなる風か
- すへに吹らん
Otherwise I might have needed at least one of these:
This is probably the most difficult step in figuring out what the poem says. Even if you have access to dictionaries such as the ones cited above, they are not easy to use.
Of course, recognizing the orthographic symbols that are on the page, while difficult, is only the first part of the problem. If you can't transliterate the 漢字 into 仮名, then you can't look up words you don't understand in a 古語辞典. So the next question is, how do you get from the 漢字仮名混じり文 above to the 全仮名 version below?
- むさしのは
- ゆけどもあきの
- をはりぞなき
- いかなるかぜか
- すへにふくらむ
The reading for 武蔵 in 武蔵野 is a case of 義訓, an assignment of sound (むさし) to symbol (武蔵) based on what the symbol (武蔵) is used to denote. The readings of 義訓 are almost impossible to guess at, so you'll have to look up 武 in a 漢和辞典.
For example, you will find it in the entry for 武 under the list of usages in personal names in this:
Or you will find it among the main entries as 武蔵 in this:
This latter is especially informative. It will tell you that 武蔵 was once a feudal holding that took up most of modern Tokyo and parts of Saitama and Kanagawa prefectures.
If you had guessed that 武蔵野 was a place name in the first place, you might find it in something like this:
Once you find where 武蔵野 is, you could see that the area overlaps present-day 武蔵野市, an urban center in the Tokyo Metropolitan area.
As for the rest of the poem, you won't get far unless you recognize that what you are dealing with is a late-medieval text written in a Classical Japanese register, with its own grammatical and orthographical conventions. The better you know the job at hand, the better you can choose your tools.
Classical Japanese uses 歴史的仮名遣い, which, depending on the word involved, does not always correspond to the 仮名 of modern Japanese. Until you memorize these alternate "spellings," you can't be assured that you'll find a 漢字 word where you expect it in a 古語辞典 based on the "spelling" of a Modern Japanese cognate. What can you do about this?
One way to find the right "spelling" for 終 is to look up the 漢字 in an old-style 漢和辞典, such as this one:
Among the various readings under the entry for 終 you will find the Classical "spelling": ヲハリ.
Another way to find the right "spelling" for 終 is to look up the Modern Japanese おわり in this book:
Among the various Classical Japanese words that are related to the concept denoted by the Modern Japanese word おわり, you will also find the Classical Japanese cognate, written 終, together with its "spelling," をはり.
With experience, students of Classical Japanese will come to remember, for example, that the Classical Japanese equivalent to Modern Japanese [o] is sometimes written お and sometimes を, just as [wa] is sometimes written わ and sometimes は. And they also learn, for example, that in the Classical Japanese word corresponding to Modern Japanese 末(すえ), the sound [e] in the second mora may be written へ (as in the poem above), and it may even be written ゑ. And they learn that when they see ん in final position in a verb phrase, it may be a substitute for む.
Most of this large set of one-to-many mappings is due to the process of sound change collapsing older distinctions, and subsequent conventions of writing adjusting to the change and thereby obscuring those older distinctions. You can find charts detailing the alternate "spellings" for 仮名 of Modern Japanese in the back of most 古語辞典, for example, pp. 1530 - 1532 in this:
But one look at the chart will show you there's quite a lot to remember when it comes to how the language and writing system have changed over time. So for the novice, the 「現代語から古語が引ける古語類語辞典」 cited above can be a useful shortcut. (It comes into its own as a resource when to try your hand at writing 和歌.)
To ascertain the morphological forms of the final mora of the verb roots for 行~ and 吹~ preceding their respective auxiliaries ~ども and ~らむ (for which Hideie gave us no 送り仮名), you have to know more about how the grammar of Classical Japanese works. Then you'll know that what Hideie implied (but did not write) is 行(け)~ and 吹(く)~. (The け and the く do not need to be written out because the vocalic value of the 「く」行 root-ending in both cases is determined by the type of auxiliary that follows the verb root in question.)
And speaking of grammar, once you've found the readings for the symbols, a whole new problem arises: How does it all fit together to mean something? And ultimately what does the poem have to say?
To arrive at your own answer about what it all means, you'll need various bits and pieces of Classical Japanese grammar, all of which can be found in 「岩波 古語辞典」, (pp. 1467 - 1509). There are many other good summaries of Classical Japanese grammar, but this one is, if not the most accessible, then at least both concise and complete.
If you have trouble understanding the many example sentences used in a 古語辞典 like the one cited above, you might want to use a 全訳古語辞典 like this:
Dictionaries of this sort give Modern Japanese translations of all the example sentences used in their definitions. They can be a big help in building a confident understanding of the grammar and vocabulary of Classical Japanese.
So what does it all mean? Sometimes poetry anthologies provide some commentary about the meaning of a poem, or even a Modern Japanese translation of it. If we were lucky, we could find the poem in an anthology such as this:
- (The CD-ROM version, below, has a search function which makes it extremely easy to use.)
But this seems to be a little-known poem. I haven't been able to find any translation of it, either into English or into Modern Japanese. So I'll have to make my own rough attempt at a translation of Hideie's poem:
- To Musashino
- though go you may, the Autumn
- will have no ending.
- What kind of wind will you find
- blowing where you are destined?
Maybe this is just sour grapes. Or perhaps Hideie is genuinely concerned about what kind of reception the monk will receive back home. A little more research into the historical background of the people in question and the conventions of 短歌 composition current at that time might be in order.
Working from primary sources is the best way to do research, but they can be intractable in their raw form. Thankfully, the better part of old texts have been pored over by philologists and historians, who have catalogued, annotated, and interpreted them. (As this process has been going on for hundreds of years, in some cases the annotations are in 漢文, however, and are not immediately accessible.) Furthermore, most of the problems that learners face have been anticipated by lexicogaphers, so when you have a job to do, you'll likely find the right tool for it.
The poem above is a bit too obscure to figure in major compilations, it seems. But the hardest part of the work had already been done by the cataloguer who put it up on the internet, making it much easier to for us to decipher here.
