Untitled
君去れば飲まれぬままに薄まれるコーヒーに浮く氷片ぼくは
‘Darling when you left’
Darling when you left
with your glass standing untouched,
inside it floating,
weakening down the coffee,
the shrinking ice fragment i
Untitled
Word for word:
kimi sareba / nomarenu mama ni / usumamareru /
you when left not drunk as is becoming diluted
kōhii ni uku / hyōhen boku wa
coffee in floating ice fragment I (topic marker)
Bridge version:
when you left, floating in your un-drunk coffee, diluting it, ice cubes and me
We loved this small poem about iced coffee which also seems to tell the story of a relationship. The Japanese has a slightly informal, intimate tone, which we decided to mimic by beginning the poem ‘darling’ – it adds an extra level to the imagery that comes afterwards. Similarly, we picked our synonyms very carefully in order to suggest an emotional drama playing out. Instead of ‘undrunk’ we chose ‘standing untouched’ (with the hint of being stood up); instead of ‘diluting’ or ‘watering down’ we chose ‘weakening down’ – it is both fresher as a phrase and more suggestive of a sense of powerlessness. In order to meet our 7 syllables in the last line we also unpacked the image slightly and added the word ‘shrinking’. The tanka itself has an oddly free-floating ‘I’ at the end. We noticed, neatly, that ‘i’ is a fragment of the word ‘ice.’ The speaker ends the poem alone, diminished and suspended too.
Clare Pollard, Poet-facilitator
Please note: this tanka does not have a title so we have used the first line as a title.