2010-08-20

The Sorrowful Truth?

This entry may be a little melancholy.

I sometimes read a certain site that is written about the author's daily life and sometimes old Japanese poems. She usually writes an entry in modern Japanese, but she writes a sad entry in old Japanese once every few months. I'll translate five sentences into English.

-On a winter night, someone's words helped me when I nearly went mad.

-After he left and I had nothing to do, I realized that I loved him

-On a rainy winter day, I asked you "where are you?", but I received no reponse.

-It has been raining for a long time and I have no where to go, so I wish I could become a bubble of a stream.

-I run after you again and again, but I can't catch up with you, and I found a cluster amaryllis in the street in autumn.

The second one was quoted from old Japanese literature. Reading only these sad entries again, especially the last one, I noticed these sorrowful meanings because a cluster amaryllis reminds Japanese people of graves and death. Anyone who has not studied old Japanese would not recognize the meaning of them.These sentences are writer's original except a quotation.

I think she might have written it in old Japanese to make it more ambiguous. I'm not sure if this is a fiction or a true story.

I can show you only on excerpt:
ある時は ありのすさびに 語らはで 恋しきものと 別れてぞ知る

If you are a Japanese learner and memorize this sentence, you already would be an Japanese expert. You can't use that phrase anywhere though.

2010-08-09

Don't Print Such a Strange Word on It, Please!

I tidied up a closet yesterday and found two things in a box that my mother sent last month. One of them was a T-shirt.

When I was a studnet, I got the T-shirt as a premium at a festival of some sort. I wore that T-shirt instead of pajamas in a dormitory because it design was not so good. On that night, my friend called me,"Hey, spleen!" I didn't know that she was talking about at first, but after seeing her looking at my T-shirt, I understood.

Right up till then, I didn't know what the word meant. I don't understand why the designer would put such a word on a T-shirt. Native English speakers also found such a word strange, moreover it was about spleen. Speaking of which, "Go for it!" was in small print on the back. What a dowdy T-shirt!

Since then, we have a habit of reading the words printed on people's clothes.