Hairlines - a new strand running East to West, Candida Clark

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Yosano Akiko (1878 – 1942)

Yosano Akiko (1878 – 1942)

(ä'ké' ko yo' sä' no), Japanese poet, activist, and critic. Best known for passionately romantic verse, she infused the classic tanka poetic form with new life and a heady sensuality. Yosano and her husband Tekkan Yosano, also a poet, published the literary journal Myôjô, which introduced a number of poets of the contemporary Japanese romantic movement to the literary public. A prominent pacifist and feminist, Yosano spoke out against the Sino-Japanese war and the growing nationalistic fervor of the times. She later founded a woman’s college, the Bunka Gakuin.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2001

Shinsui after washing her hair

From ‘Hair in Sweet Disorder’

Measures my hair a full five feet,
And washed and combed so soft and fair
As is my heart virginal and sweet
I cherish with a tender care.

A score of age with raven hair
So glossy and well-combed is she,
And in her flowering spring and fair
Is lovely as you wish to see!

From ‘The Small Folding-Fan’

With callous hand you touch my hair
Sleek, sensitive, my very pride,
And lo, the raven tresses dare
Now of themselves to be untied.

A haiku by Ozaki Hosai (1885-1926):

(‘Taiku no mashita boshi kaburazu’)

From Sōkeishū by Kotomichi Ōkuma (translated by Yukuo Uyehara and Marjorie Sinclair, from A Grass Path)

From Song of Songs (3rd century BC Hebrew, translated by Marcia Falk).

Yes, I am black! and radiant —
0 city women watching me —
As black as Kedar's goathair tents
Or Solomon's fine tapestries.
Will you disrobe me with your stares?
The eyes of many morning suns
Have pierced my skin, and now I shine
Black as the light before the dawn.
And I have faced the angry glare
Of others, even my mother's sons
Who sent me out to watch their vines
While I neglected all my own.

Turning to him, who meets me with desire —

Come, love, let us go out to the open fields
And spend our night lying where the henna blooms,
Rising early to leave for the near vineyards
Where the vines flower, opening tender buds,
And the pomegranate boughs unfold their blossoms.

There among blossom and vine I will give you my love,
Musk of the violet mandrakes spilled upon us...
And returning, finding our doorways piled with fruits,
The best of the new-picked and the long-stored,
My love, I will give you all I have saved for you.

Under the quince tree
you woke
to my touch
there
where she conceived
where she who carried
and bore you
conceived

(translated from Hebrew by Marcia Falk)

Written towards the end of the Eastern Jin (late fourth century in JiangNan, modern China) ZiYeGe is a song about a girl, ZiYe (translated by Dylan W.H. Sung from a Japanese source).

Late into the day, her locks are uncombed
Strands of hair cover her shoulders
Relaxed atop her gentleman's knees
Where then, would she be unpitied?

... and for some classical Japanese beauty-tips, click here

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Hairlines - a new strand running East to West, Candida Clark