#OBVIOUSLY that's doris bargen. you look dumber if you try to gloss that. everyone knows you're talking about doris

[stellerssong]

i am sending you a star for the heians fic. what did i miss. please gush about the heians.

did you miss anything in the heians fic? i don't think you missed anything in the heians fic. or if you did miss anything in the heians fic i don't know if it is anything that is necessarily of interest to anyone but me? y'all, i went in way too hard on this fic. the amount of research i did would infuriate and dismay you. and in all fairness i was being metaphorically swung around by the ankles and thwacked against a wall at work at the time of writing it, so i kind of had nothing else to do but get a little annoying about historical references, but. y'know. @ me maybe make it about samurai next time or like something people care about.

oh, here's a thing i guess—i kind of liked my rendering of the one historical poem presented in full in this fic, Michitsuna no Haha's poem of the barred gate. in Edward Seidensticker's translation:

Do you know how slow the dawn can be when you have to wait alone?

and in Sonja Arntzen's (superior) rendition:

Sorrow, sorrowing when one sleeps alone the time until night opens into day, how long it is perhaps you now know it too.

like DAMN Sonja. that hits DIFFERENT. but at the same time having decided to not commit to the 5-7-5-7-7 meter throughout because i'm too fucking lazy i wanted to keep the flow of the poetic exchanges less formalized and more conversational as they would have felt in real heians time, i wanted to compress the feeling Arntzen captured into something a little pithier like Seidensticker's version. (but less stupidly phrased. "how slow the dawn can be"? like my mans, surely "how slow the coming of the dawn" makes more fucking sense.) hence:

How long and chill the night when one must sleep alone—perhaps you understand it now!

and yes, i lost the "opening" imagery that plays on the barred gate, and yes, maybe i added in some meteorological allusions that weren't in the original, and no, i still don't speak any japanese and am just going on vibes, SORRY I KNOW THAT MAKES ME JUST LIKE ARTHUR WALEY WHICH IS DISGUSTING OF ME, but idk. all things considered, at the very least i think mine reads a leetle nicer than Ed's.

and additionally, here's a secret: i kinda fucked up my shinden-zukuri architecture in the first section frankly. there's no real reason why the lady of the house would be hanging out in the hisashi alone in the middle of the night while her ladies-in-waiting are asleep in the moya. i guess you could handwave it like "ohh she stayed up waiting for Kaneie ohhh she couldn't stay in the inner room with all those people ohh Desire was simply doing some fuckshit" but like. get real. be serious. why would she have a brazier out there? why would she call it "my rooms"? (i guess there's an argument to be made that by "my rooms" she's referring to her entire wing of the house but still.) she's practically NAKED hanging out out there fully dressed in multiple layers with the screen slightly cracked. UNACCEPTABLY whorish behavior.

fucking intolerable. i'm humiliated. this is worse than the poems not scanning in a language i have never studied and do not speak. Sonja Arntzen is en route to my house to visit unspeakable horrors upon my person at this very moment. and it's like noooo, Sonja, please, i'm not even a heians scholar, spare me and i'll help you hunt down Royall Tyler instead!! but she doesn't care. she just. doesn't. care.