I struggle with this -- I read a fair amount of Japanese literature and history, and I don't have the grounding in the Chinese classics that pretty much any literate Japanese reader of the time would have. So I'm the person who needs a hundred thousand footnotes to understand a haiku, let alone a playful renga or something... I'm missing a huge percentage of the expected connotations because I come from such a different framework, and that changes the experience of the art.
Several years ago, I had a fever of 104 and in my fevered delirium conceived of the notion that the closest equivalent in Western literature for references was the Bible, and I had written some tanka for my then-girlfriend (Japanese-American) about Ruth to Naomi and how my love for her was like unto... oof. Thankfully the fever broke before I actually *sent* them. (Neither of us are Christian, so it would have been super weird.) We broke up shortly thereafter, but at least it was unrelated. Getting dumped because of incompatibility is way way better than getting dumped because you wrote someone weird Bible haiku when fevered. [giggling] It's funny now.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2016-12-14 08:55 am (UTC)Several years ago, I had a fever of 104 and in my fevered delirium conceived of the notion that the closest equivalent in Western literature for references was the Bible, and I had written some tanka for my then-girlfriend (Japanese-American) about Ruth to Naomi and how my love for her was like unto... oof. Thankfully the fever broke before I actually *sent* them. (Neither of us are Christian, so it would have been super weird.) We broke up shortly thereafter, but at least it was unrelated. Getting dumped because of incompatibility is way way better than getting dumped because you wrote someone weird Bible haiku when fevered. [giggling] It's funny now.