I am trying to find words related to the image of the moon that have the same suggestive power. The word “cast” means throwing [off], directing [eyes], causing [light] to appear, discard, the phrase cast a spell; the idioms cast doubt, cast lots, cast adrift. It is not a poor solution, but finally pales, so to speak.

Here is a second Ono no Komachi poem:

Brower and Miner (204) paraphrase the poem: A thing which fades without its color visible is the flower of the heart of a man of the middle of the world (i.e., of this world).

Here is my attempt at translation:

that flush—

what changes

in this world of

a man’s heart and

its flower—

What are my reasonings behind this translation exercise? Another way to think of the pivot-word is, in my mind, a portal word. Because the poem erupts at that moment, the reader can enter at the site for other possibilities. Because Komachi started with iro, the poem keeps shifting its tonal color: hana/flower, hito/man, and kokoro/heart-mind. The progression in these thirty-one syllables radiates outward (Brower and Miner, 205). I hope that in my modest translation, flush can carry the ambiguity of the facial glow from illness or embarrassment, a cleansing, and even driving a bird from its cover. Finally, in both of my translation exercises, I have experienced again how to go with words that are marvelously “unstable.”

JUXTAPOSING

Before commenting on how juxtaposition affects progression, I need to cite the translator Hiroaki Sato on the tanka form and its syllabic units (visible when lineated): as a “sense-making unit [the tanka became] a two-part poem of upper and lower hemistiches with a single strong caesura after 5-7-5” (Sato, String of Beads, 26–27). In such a way the Komachi poem would have been rendered vertically as one line. Here is the horizontal romanization:

iro miede utsurou mono wa yo no naka no hito no kokoro no hana ni zo arikeru

understood as: