Emperor & Empress in Western Style Dress by Yoshu Chikanobu
Recently, I ran across an older volume of tanka entitled Imperial Japanese Poems of the Meiji Era. Published in 1914 in English and translated by Frank Alanson Lombard, the volume contains the work of Emperor Meiji and the Empress Dowager Shoken. The Emperor was said to have written over 100,000 waka and the Empress over 30,000.
I opened the volume to the following poem, pg. 83, and was greatly taken:
Easily we brush
The fallen dust from garments
Gleaming white and fair;
But from the mind beclouded
How hard to sweep the shadows!
Empress Dowager Shoken
I continued to look through the collection and yet nothing came close to this initial randomly selected piece, by either the Emperor or the Empress Dowager. Perhaps it is the translations by Lombard; the poems found here by both are fairly interesting. I'll continue to page through the 1914 volume and read the work of both poets, but, well, sometimes serendipity is all.
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Greed by Scabeater
Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.
our shameful shadows!
in the long night walking
in vain
translated by David G. Lanoue
Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.
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