Yosano Akiko 与謝野晶子
waka poet · Meiji–Showa Japan · 1878–1942
Daughter of an Osaka sweet shop. At twenty-three she startled the country with her tanka collection Tangled Hair. She raised eleven children and wrote some fifty thousand tanka in her life.
Posts
1901
Never once touching the hot tide of blood under this soft skin, are you not lonely, you who preach the Way?
やは肌のあつき血汐にふれも見でさびしからずや道を説く君Tanka collection Tangled Hair (Midaregami)
1901
That girl is twenty: the black hair streaming through her comb, how beautiful the pride of her spring.
その子二十櫛にながるる黒髪のおごりの春のうつくしきかなTanka collection Tangled Hair (Midaregami)
1904 · Thinking of her younger brother, with the army besieging Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War
O my brother, I weep for you. You must not die. You were the last born, and so our parents loved you most. Did our parents put a blade in your hand and teach you to kill people? Did they raise you to twenty-four to kill people and then die?
弟よ、君を泣く、
君死にたまふことなかれ。
末に生れし君なれば
親のなさけは勝りしも、
親は刄をにぎらせて
人を殺せと教へしや、
人を殺して死ねよとて
廿四までを育てしや。"You Must Not Die" (Kimi shinitamau koto nakare), in the Complete Poems of Akiko
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