The Cento

I discovered Japanese literature from reading the Seidensticker translation of The Tale of Genji in high school. I had read a few haiku before then, of course, but never really appreciated them. The Tale of Genji was written by a lady-in-waiting a thousand years ago. It is considered by many to be the world's earliest novel, and one of its greatest. At the time, composing poetry was a common pastime for the upper class. The novel is replete with poetry contests and love poems, as well as frequent allusions to older poems, including many that are no longer extant. These caught my fascination: over a millennium ago, poems were composed that are now lost in the mists of time, save for a single line or phrase preserved in this book. The people who wrote them have been entirely forgotten, in many cases even their meanings are only hinted at by the contexts in which they are quoted. The thought of them made me sad, so I wrote a poem for each one. I called the project "Adopting Orphaned Poetic Allusions." None of them were particularly distinguished, but the idea stayed with me.

There is a kind of poem called the cento that is composed entirely of lines from other poets. When I learned about this form, I thought of course of those misty lost lines from the Genji. I ended up making four centos from them. This one is my favorite; I call it "Parenthesis":

Sadly, sadly we have journeyed this distance
(Might I have it back again?)
Past Karadomari we row, past Kawajiri,
Hid behind eightfold mountain mists
(Mists are as unkind as people),
The pines of Ota,
The Silent Waterfall
(It falls from above),
The cypress pillar on which she had leaned,
And an angler might have wanted to have a try at the waters by her pillow
(But the strings are broken.)
It was worse than if the jewels upon the silken sleeve had been shattered to bits.
The grass first greens on the general’s grave
(The seed that falls upon good ground)
If he does not come,
And I am afraid that it would only be cause to remember
(But so to think was, after all, to think.)
When I think of her,
I am almost sorry that we were so close.
(But not even that was permitted her.)
Is she the rain, is she the clouds? Alas, I cannot say.
The wild goose in the clouds--as sad as I am?
(In a village where it does not sing.)
A person even longs for the pain,
Like the pain, perhaps, of awaiting a visitor who does not come,
(Where would you have me turn?)
Meeting and not meeting.
It was only yesterday, you think, and already thirty years and more have gone by.
(And whose is the more sorrowfully injured name?)
And in more recent times?
The rains are as the rains of other years
(Each year brings rains of autumn.)
One becomes fond, after a time, of sea and strand,
The wrong trees, the wrong fence
(A bridge that floats across dreams?)
We love while we live.
Even as I spoke,
(Were I to join them…)
The cherries coming into bloom and already shedding their blossoms,
A blossom of the deepest hue, and yet--
(How well one knows)
They bloom for the morning.
And the cherry, among them all, seems right for the bird of spring
(The cuckoo of the grove of Iwase).
So you really are going to send me off into the dawn? It is new to me, and I am sure to lose my way.