Hello everyone,
I’m new to Japanese language. I made this poem using kanbun and mangyogana to sing it in Shigin. But I’m not sure that it follows the rule of the old/classical well enough. I would like to shorten it because singing in shigin requires to lengthen the words to make melodies, without breaking the respect to the old Japanese language.
The poem is here:
水に月、鏡に美、散る桜。(Sui ni getsu, kyou ni bi, sakura chiru – Moon on water, Beauty in mirror, Cherry blossoms fall)
市場に鴉、首を晒す。 (Ichiba ni karasu, Kubi wo sarasu – Crows on the marketplace (the place that people buy food), heads are being shown)
城にて、婚礼にて歓声あり。姫は部屋。 (Jo nite, Konrei nite kangei, Hime wa heya – In the castle, The marriage party is jubilant, The princess is in her room)
桜散る、侍の首落つ。姫化粧。 (Sakura chiru, Samurai no kubi otsu, Hime keshou –
Cherry blossoms fall. The samurai’s head had been fallen. The princess is making up.)
水に月、 鏡に映る涙、 桜月二つ (Sui ni getsu, Kyou ni namida, Sakura getsu futatsu – Moon on water, Tears in mirror, Cherry blossom tears the moon in two)
桜散る、鴉はいない , 髑髏ばかり (Sakura chiru, Karasu wa inai, Dokuro bakari – Cherry blossoms fall, Crows are not there, only skulls)
桜散る、 新主ふらふら、 姫は塀木 (Sakura chiru, shinshu furafura, Hime wa hanegi – Cherry blossoms fall, the new lord walks unstably, the princess walks to the balcony)
桜散る、 来世あらば 、 月うつしや (Sakura chiru, Raisei araba, Getsu utsushi ya – Cherry blossom fall, If there is an afterlife, Oh the moon is beautiful)
4 comments
I’m not strong enough in classical Japanese to make serious suggestions, but I don’t think it’s very normal to have all those single-kanji on’yomi words like すい for 水 and げつ for 月. Why not use the native words there? It would be much more in line with the way Japanese poetry usually works, and they’d be the same number of morae anyway.
Also, there’s no kanbun or man’yogana here–is this a transcription of something you initially wrote both in kanbun and in man’yogana?
Can I ask why are you trying to compose a poem in the older style of literary Japanese writing if you’re new to the language?
Kanbun would be approximating Middle Chinese. It would look just like Chinese and be written and read without kana. It’s not as simple as swapping out the pronunciations. [Wikipedia has examples.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun)
Mayougana, to my knowledge, would be representative of the spoken language (Japanese) but written in kanji, almost as if they were ateji – plus the occasional kanji as nouns and so on.
For Shigin, shouldn’t you have or write the Classical Chinese poem first, and then kundoku it in Japanese?