beforebreakfast.net

明けましておめでとうございます！I hope you all had a nice New Year’s, wherever you may be. I also hope no one’s 二日酔（ふつかよ）い is too serious.

In honor of the New Year’s, I’d like to share the preface from the 徒然草（つれづれぐさ）, with which many of you are no doubt familiar. The 徒然草 (which takes it name from the passage that follows) is a collection of essays written in the early 1300s by a monk named 吉田兼好（よしだけんこう）. The essays are about life, nature, death, and all sorts of other themes that tend not to change even after 700 years have passed.

So here’s the preface from the collection, which is the only bit of it that most people know at all. Read it to yourself. I’ll then go through and explain each part. A caveat: I am by no means an expert on classical Japanese grammar. I do know a fair bit, though, and I’ll do my best to explain it all accurately.

徒然草

つれづれなるままに、日暮（ひぐ）らし、硯（すずり）にむかひて、心にうつりゆくよしなし事を、そこはかとなく書きつくれば、あやしうこそものぐるほしけれ。

Vocabulary:

つれづれ（な／の）: idle; bored because you don’t have anything better to do.

日暮（ひぐ）らし: from morning until night. From the words 日, meaning "day" and 暮らす, "to spend" (as of time).
硯（すずり）: an inkstone. If you’ve ever done Japanese calligraphy, you’ve probably used one of these. You put a small amount of water onto the stone, then rub a block of solid ink against the stone to make ink with the water. You can see a picture of one here, along with a brush （筆（ふで）） and the block of ink (墨（すみ）) in its solid form.

むかう: to face, to turn one’s head/body towards. (むかひて is an old form of むかって)

うつりゆく: to move along with the passage of time. The verb is normally used to describe the slow movement of objects as time passes; think of the shadow of a tree slowly moving as the sun moves in the sky. However, in this case, it’s used metaphorically to describe thoughts popping into (and out of, I suppose) the writer’s mind. This is a compound verb formed from 移（うつ）る (to move; to pass (of time)) and 行（い／ゆ）く, to go.

よしなし: meaningless, without a purpose; rambling, whimsical. This is easier to understand if you look at the kanji: 由無し. 由 is reminiscent of 理由（りゆう）, "meaning," and 無し is an older form of ない. So よしなし could be translated into modern Japanese as 「理由がない」 or 「意味がない」, though one modern translation I saw translated it as とりとめない (which is, itself, often used as an adjective and translated as "rambling").

そこはかとなく: rambling, without a sense of purpose. This may sound very similar to よしなし, but it’s also a little different. The word comes from 「其処（そこ）は彼（か）とない」, where か means something like a modern-day あれ. Something like "a lack of explaining which places are what." It’s saying that these thoughts are rambling and may be unclear, though they get the general sense of meaning across.

かきつく: This is usually interpreted as a form of 書きつく, "to jot down." Thus, かきつくれば would mean something like "when I write down." However, it just occurred to me that the verb 掻き付く, which means "to put into order" (like you do to messy hair with a comb), would have the same ば form- it would become かきつくれば in classical Japanese. Thus, this part could have a dual meaning! I wonder if I’m the first person to ever realize this.

あやしうこそ: This is an adverbial form of あやしい combined with こそ, a emphasizing particle you may know from the ubiquitous polite phrase 「こちらこそ」. In old Japanese (and still in 関西弁（かんさいべん） today), adverbial forms of adjectives could lose the "k" sound, and thus go from ーく to ーう. You probably know another word that was formed in a similar way: ようこそ！ It was originally shortened from a longer phrase, something like 「ようこそおいでくださいました」.

ものぐるほしけれ: This is an old adjective form, called the 已然形（いぜんけい）, of the adjective we currently know as ものぐるおしい. It means "seeming as if one is losing one’s sanity." In this case can be interpreted as being in the past tense. The 已然形 is a result of it being linked with the adjective via こそ; old grammatical rules and all that. 

I know, that’s a lot to keep in your head at once. I’m not trying to undertake teaching you classical Japanese here, mind you. I’m just trying to help you understand a bit of it, to give you a taste of what it’s like. If you want to learn more, I’ll give you some links where you can do so. But first, a translation, by Donald Keene, who sort of looks like Tortimer from Animal Crossing:

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realise I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts that have entered my head.

Does that match up with the idea you got from the text? Does this remind anyone else of how you feel after too much blogging? (Oy vey, this has been a long entry to write.)

If you’re interested in reading more of this work, you can visit this site, which even has translations into 現代語（げんだいご） for the entirety of the work. If you want to know more about classical Japanese in general, I’d have to recommend Professor Haruo Shirane’s books about the subject (textbook and reader).

If you’re sick of all of this classical grammar and want to read more about more modern, "relevant" stuff, I’ll try to take us back into the present in my next entry.