by *Nina*, Flickr
サンダンカの花を揚羽の発てるとき かなたに海の見えし気のせり When a black butterfly left
from a scarlet mass of tiny flowers,
Sky blue seemed momentary to have done
turning into twinkling Ocean blue
My town has no sea, and the fact might make me long for sometimes to see it.When I look back in the past, I have noticed that my short travels often make me recall some memories regarding to sea with the feeling of wet sand, salt breeze, and sound of soft wave of the ebb and flow. I composed the verse reminding of the seashore in Okinawa.
海恋し潮の遠鳴り数えては乙女となりし父母の家
(There always sound of waves in a distance from my parents' house, and I grew up counting them in occasion)
与謝野 晶子(1878~1942)Yosano Akiko
寄せかえす波のしぐさのやさしさに いつ言われてもいいさようなら
(So gentle the way of waves comes and goes, and I'm all right now if you would say good-by)
俵 万智(1962~)Tawara Machi
These are too famous to dare to translate, so I wrote just about the contents underneath of each of the two.
Yosano Akiko is a writer and poet ,who had ideas of Romanticism that became as a mainstream later than that of in Europe, and wrote sensational poems and writings. According to the book 「風景と実感」by 吉川 宏志(Yoshikawa Hiroshi),a contemporary tanka writer,"objectivity"was a term for appreciation some art, but Yosano Akiko took the term of the word for those who create or write.In other word, she turned over the meaning of "objectivity".
The tanka verse with colloquial expression by Tawara Machi is written in her maiden work, "Salad Anniversary", that gave great influence especially to young women as Yosano Akiko had done as an epoch maker.
by *Nina*, Flickr
Here I will write down a part of a famous poem by French poet, Jean Cocteau
わたしの耳は貝の殻 海の響きを懐かしむ translated by 堀口 大学Horiguchi Daigaku
Mon oreille est un coquillage
Qui aime le bruit de la mer (Cannes)
Ocean is mer in French, and mother is mere: In Japanese mother is 母,and ocean is 海.These letters embrace each other in the both languages. Is it accidental coincidence?