Ame ni mo Makezu

"Ame ni mo makezu" is a famousFact|date=December 2007 poem written by Kenji Miyazawa, a poet from the northern prefecture of Iwate in Japan. The poem was found posthumously in a small black notebook in one of the poet's trunks.

The text of the poem is given below in Japanese, as a transliteration using romaji, and in translation. This version includes some kanji; some versions use only katakana.

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The Poem

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Style

Miyazawa chose to write the poem using katakana. This is stylistically odd from a modern perspective, as katakana is nowadays (usually) only used in Japanese writing to denote foreign words. However, at the time, katakana rather than hiragana was the preferred syllabary. The limited use of kanji might be viewed as a move to make his poem more accessible to the rural folk of northern Japan with whom he spent his life, or perhaps as similar to American poet E. E. Cummings's style in using primarily lower case.

Notes

* It's important to note that cold summers in Japan mean a poor rice harvest, hence the line "when the summer is cold wandering upset".

* The transliteration above is direct, and reflects the orthographical conventions of Miyazawa's time. For instance, コハガラナクテ ("kohagaranakute") would today be rendered as コワガラナクテ ("kowagaranakute"), イヒ ("ihi") as イイ ("ii"), and サウ ("sau") as ソウ ("sou").

* "hidori" in "hidori no toki ha namida wo nagashi" is generally taken as a simple typo, because he made the same typos in his other works. But hidori means the daily wages of day laborers in the dialect of Hanamaki, so some people believe the true meaning of this verse is that Miyazawa cries for sympathy to the poor farmers who have to work by the day. ( [http://www.kenji.gr.jp/library/qanda/hidori.html] )

External links

* [http://www3.ocn.ne.jp/~gogouan/Ryokan/kenji.html Pictures of Miyazawa's notebook] , showing the pages where the poem was found after his death
* [http://www.kenji-world.net/english/download/works/Rain.html Be not Defeated by the Rain] , an alternative translation by David Sulz
* [http://www.bhk-limited.com/ Unperturbed by the Rain] , an alternative translation by Steven P. Venti
* [http://books.google.com/books?id=J-qzVMaJGPUC&pg=PA193&lpg=PA193&dq=miyazawa+kenji+standing+up+to+the+rain&source=web&ots=vc6KwH5wo7&sig=6qAAqur9ILRJadsUH2Xf882IawE Standing Up to the Rain] , an alternative translation from Letters from the End of the World