I’m continuing my experiments with recapturing emotional and tonal effects in translation (see here and here) with this rendering of the Iroha poem, a Heian-era Japanese pangram (piece of writing containing every item in a writing system—in this case, every kana then in use in Japanese). This is actually not my preferred approach to translation at all—that hews a little bit closer to word-for-word rather than thought-for-thought or feeling-for-feeling—but it is one that interests me very much, especially when it comes to source material with which I am very familiar.

“Hakata Komori Uta” (“Hakata Lullaby”) is a comic folk song (with a dark twist at the end) written by an anonymous nursemaid (komori), probably a teenage girl, in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Japan. These nursemaids did not necessarily work in the grand households that might have had domestic servants in the West; often they worked for other working-class people, whose luck had simply not been as hard as their own.