Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

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shichinanatsu
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Re: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Post by shichinanatsu »

one thing jesse.. register; if you're going to be this helpful then why not make it formal?

and i really think you're onto something about suou.. though technically, interfaces (IDSE's yuki et al) are more like tabula-rasa AI upon insertion. that is, their accumulated experiences endow them with personalities, largely unique in each scenario. with ryouko's case - assumed to have 'lived' longer than yuki's 3yrs - there is a predominant disdain of the human condition, in that her awareness of the higher planes of existence led her to see most human mentalities as illogical. there is also evidence of disgruntlement with her superiors, in that she believes further stimulation of the subject - suzumiya haruhi - is a must, which we know goes against the status quo put forth by yuki's backers. ultimately it somehow adds up to her becoming self-destructive; she must have had an inkling that yuki would stop at nothing to keep haruhi in the dark, even if it meant ryouko would have to be dealt with appropriately.

*character analysis of asakura ryouko taken from character album.. opinion only*

given that suou doesn't have much of a personality to begin with, simply because she hasn't enough time to 'mingle with the locals', so to speak. if at all, her mission would be the only motivation she has for sticking with tachibana's group. going into further speculation; given yuki's evolution into something more than an LHI, suou's insertion might be more than just surveillance for suzumiya haruhi. more like surveillance for kyon as well, in that he is the primary driving force in yuki's evolution, as well as many other things.


*double post*

with regards to jesse's mentioning ogura #61 and #74, i decided to include them here as well..

#61
Spoiler! :
Image

Ise no Osuke____________Lady Ise no Osuke

Inishie no______________Eight-fold cherry flowers
Nara no miyako no_______That at Nara--ancient seat
Yae-zakura_____________Of our state--have bloomed,
Kyo kokonoe ni__________In our nine-fold palace court
Nioi nuru kana__________Shed their sweet perfume today.
#74
Spoiler! :
Image

Minamoto no Toshiyori Ason______Minamoto no Toshiyori

Ukari keru_____________________It was not for this
Hito o Hatsuse no_______________I prayed at the holy shrine:
Yama oroshi___________________That she would become
Hageshikare to wa______________As pitiless and as cold
Inoranu mono o_________________As the storms on Hase's hills.
雨 (ame) trilogy 8)

[070428] アメサラサ (amesarasa)
[090925] 夏ノ雨 (natsu no ame)
[120831] イモウトノカタチ (imouto no katachi)
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jesse+
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Re: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Post by jesse+ »

Oh, I'd love to register. Love to. Can't get a confirmation email.

What little we know about the SCD is that they are so different from anything we know they make the aliens we already knew look similar. She might have a completely different mission. She might be a member of the SCD - the impression I got the first time I read it was that of something wearing a human-suit. Kyon describes her movements as "more mechanical than any machine."

Maybe the IDSE's human interfaces were planned to grow from non-human, gaining emotions to communicate with humans, while the SCD's interfaces were the opposite? Maybe Suou started with a full suite of emotions and slowly lost them over the past three-and-a-half years. The poem is how she felt when it was happening.

Maybe she was human originally.
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Re: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Post by jesse* »

About Ogura 74, I think that's just Minamoto Toshiyori's contribution to the Ogura. What Yuki quoted was a different poem from the source she quoted which is still in the revision history on the wiki, I translated it just for consistency. Minamoto Toshiyori is referred to as Ogura 74, because if you're cultured you will remember him from OHI. That's what I've gathered at least.

If I'm reading ja.wikipedia.org correctly, here is his contribution to the source Yuki quoted.
山桜咲きそめしより久方の雲居に見ゆる滝の白糸
which is gibberish if you don't understand the system but I'm already recognizing a few. I guess we don't get line breaks here. Again, this is probably the loosest translation you have ever seen. For at least one of these poems I basically extracted the themes and wrote a new one.

mountain:cherry:smile/giggle/bloom:[here I divided the kana to make sense]foundation/indictment:summons/daily bread:more than/choose/twist:久方 again, sky/moon:denotes possessive:cloud/Yunnan:dwell/reside:observe:jolt/swing/gently rock:waterfall:white/bright:(silk) thread

The mountain smiles in cherry petals
I am here to watch the clouds in their mansion
And be cradled by the waterfall
In this world sewn in white thread

I can not emphasize enough just how much Japanese I don't speak. If you can read this and also read Japanese, please fix it. That's what wikis are for.

Double post.

Now that I've made a mockery of a thousand years of tradition, I'll come up with something for Ki no Tomonori that may not be accurate but at least we know it's public domain.

Under heaven's canopy
All is peaceful light
All is careless springtime

Yet my heart will not rest
Or scatter like these blossoms

Alt. stanza 2:

Like a distant heart
Petals scatter and fade

Triple post.

I put them up, in a slightly different form. I gather from context that Tsuruya starts, Haruhi finishes, and they alternate.

I hope you enjoy them.
Last edited by jesse* on Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Post by onizuka-gto »

nice poems :)

yuki is the best!

:p
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Re: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Post by shichinanatsu »

with that, kyon's mentioning haruhi and tsuruya-san going as far as autumn makes sense, and with tsuruya-san and yuki's contribution we go into what sounds like winter as well..

summary of lines:
#61, spring
#33, spring
#35, spring
#66, spring
#67, spring
#07, summer
#94, autumn
last, winter

the thing is, exactly what was tanigawa-sensei thinking when he quoted these poems? if you remember his mentioning the Blue Bird of Happiness back in v01, then it would be safe to say that any literary references in the series are bound to have some import on the story. btw, Maeterlinck's L'Oiseau bleu also has an anime to its name. PERHAPS the popularity of the play in Japan back then had duly influenced Tanigawa-sensei in whatever form or fashion

imho, the poems stand for how much time has passed, and how things have changed along the way for the SOS-Dan. think of it as v09 being a the 1st book of a new chapter. of course, as i'm not a literature major that's just layman-speak.
雨 (ame) trilogy 8)

[070428] アメサラサ (amesarasa)
[090925] 夏ノ雨 (natsu no ame)
[120831] イモウトノカタチ (imouto no katachi)
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jesse*
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Re: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Post by jesse* »

Remember, you too can translate classical Japanese poetry with a minimum of online education. Go to Wiktionary or jisho.org for kanji, jisho for the rest, and make sure it sounds cool at least.

I've long felt the seasons are an important symbol for the characters. With the anti-SOS brigade we see the other aspects of those seasons. I think Kyon either shares Haruhi's season or is seasonless.

...on a little research, I found that seasons and elements have so much thought already into them. I won't try to reinvent anything.

Haruhi : Summer. Almost went with spring "haru" means spring, but this opposes her with Yuki better. Freedom, fire, Tanabata. Plus she likes it enough to spend six hundred years in the same one. Compare Sasaki, with the stagnation, humidity, boredom aspects of summer.
Yuki : Winter. What else. Earth. Compare Suou, who takes the in-from-the cold feeling out of it and puts in the you-will-die-of-exposure.
Itsuki : Autumn. Air. Warmth fading because he's wearing a fake personality, falling leaves, etc. Compare Kyoko. Earnest, hides nothing, like trees losing their leaves, yet painfully unappealing, like a mess of wet leaves.
Mikuru : Spring. Water. Also could be the contentedness part of summer. Blossoming flowers, looking to the future. Compare Fujiwara. Rain, mudslides, colds.

You can probably make any of them match any season or element. Or maybe Tanigawa uses five-element, five-season symbology, or maybe none at all, though due to the nature of v9 I'm not at all sure about that.

Note: In o.33 I translated 久方 hisakata as heaven's canopy. It's not a direct reference to what we've translated as the Sky Canopy Domain, that's 天蓋 tengai.
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Re: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Post by Darklor »

Since you do translate the poems now - how good were the translations of the poems at the talk page http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index ... ient_poems ?
Please don't mind my bad english since I'm german.

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Re: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Post by jesse* »

As far as I know, they're more true to the original than mine. The translations from the University of Virginia website were modernizations and direct quotations of a translator named Clay MacCauley, who understood Japanese but not readable poetry. Forced syntax and archaic vocabulary abound, and while my simple translation may lose some subtle nuances, I am sure it is much more like what these poems would sound to a modern Japanese reader, e.g. Haruhi and Tsuruya.

The university also provides restatements of some of MacCauley's translations, which in some cases I like better than my own, but I did not use them:
A. For the sake of consistency.
B. We have not received permission from the original author(s) (most likely not hard to get, if we knew where to look).
C. After analyzing them as best I could, I felt there were concepts important to the poems left out in that translation.

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/ ... glish.html
We are aware that higgledy-piggledy revision runs the risk of losing essential nuances in the totality of MacCauley's offering. But, as we argue below, whatever claim the translation may have to a poetic unity, it almost certainly obstructs an understanding by English-speaking readers of the Hyakunin Isshu poems in the 21st century...

MacCauley's translation is written in a pre-modern mode fashionable at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was the same mode in which Greek drama was translated at that time...

MacCauley is a native of the same old poetic village as Murray. And he makes matters worse for himself by retaining for his English translations the rigorous scheme of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line. As a result, his vocabulary--already filled with "thee" and "thy" and "lo!" and "'tis"-- is padded to make up the right number of syllables with "e'en" for "even" and "e'er" for "ever" and "o'er" and so on. And his syntax can accommodate lines like "Gaze I at the moon" (for "if or when I gaze at the moon").
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