And on a lighter note...

After a long and rocky road with japanese poetry, I've finally found a poet I like. Yes, it's true, you heard correctly. Or should I say, I've found a poet I understand, at least in translation. Weeell... Understand some of her poems, because some of them are even harder to understand than the classical waka I've been complaining about before.

Yosano Akiko.

I mean, she's just brilliant. *g* She's a woman poet of the early 20th c. whose best-known poetic work, Midaregami, was published in 1901. And it's radically different from any other tanka I've read this far. She also wrote a modern translation of Genji Monogatari in the 1910's and Genji poetry. And in Midaregami, as you might already have figured out from the title of this blog entry, she writes love poetry (is there such a genre as lust poetry? Because if there is, that's what her poems are) about monks. And I'm just writing an essay about her poems and the tradition of longing for buddhist monks in Japanese literature... (Yes, it's an scholarly essay folks. I have proof from 11th c. onwards that watching out for hot young monks isn't a bad thing - on the contrary, there's enough precedents to make it a traditional form of art *g*)

I might have mentioned that buddhism isn't the dry sexless religion one might think when reading some boring explanations of it. Well, this poetess certainly has opened my eyes to poetry in a whole new way... *g* Here's one as an example, as translated by Carter:

Must you lecture me?
Must you expound your Way?
Enlighten me?
Put your karma away now -
I offer you hot blood.

Or the one that got me hooked to her for the first time, also translated by Carter:

Not even once
have you touched my soft flesh
coursing with hot blood.
Don't you feel a bit lonesome,
you - always preaching your Way?

At least something I understand! At last I've found the karmic bond between me and waka (I knew it must exist somewhere...). At last I can be a proper student of japanese culture. :D Now I need to find a favorite manga/anime, and I'll have everything covered (and while searching for the perfect manga about young handsome monks I'll just go by my manga Tannisho and the manga in which Shinran battles demons while wearing only a shredded loincloth).