Wind, another Black-Naped Oriole poem

I’ve been busy the last week looking at poems in fascicle 11 of Staatsbibliothek 34981. I had not originally thought that these were autochthonous Manchu poems, but on re-reviewing it I now think they are. (If you want to know more about how I decide what is an original Manchu poem and what is a translation, see my page on the Staatsbibliothek poems.)

Here is one of the poems from that fascicle. It is another Black-Naped Oriole poem, concise and somewhat obscure. The theme is “the wind” and the rhyme is EN, comprising words ending in -en, -in, -un and -ūn, including the theme word edun.

At the end of the poem the author says that the wind is an eldest sister. Apparently each of the trigrams can be understood as a member of a family, and in this model the trigram of the wind corresponds to the eldest daughter (長女).

	edun [風]		The Wind
	Staatsbibliothek 11.5 (View Online)
	jijuhan dosin,		The entry of the trigram,
	asuki,		is a faint noise,
	untuhun,		an emptiness,
	halhūn beikuwen ai kemun,		heat and cold without order.
5	hūwašarai tucin,		It is the reason for growth,
	sigarai yarun,		the origin of leaf-fall,
	were wara kūbulin,		the cycle of nurturing and killing.
	da fukjin,		At the very beginning,
	sargan jusei —		among the daughters it was —
10	eyungge eyun.		eldest sister.

Translation Difficulties

were wara kūbulin. The phrase were wara doesn’t appear in my dictionaries, but the phrase banjire were is given in Norman for “livelihood”, and wara could be the imperfect participle of wambi, “to kill.” I have long thought that the verb wambi is somehow connected with words related to the sense of downward motion, like wasimbi, wasihūn, wala and wargi. Perhaps the verb wembi, now meaning “to melt; to warm; to civilize,” is connected with words with an upward sense like wesimbi, wesihun. If so, perhaps it originally had a meaning in opposition to wambi, with a sense of “to give life to something.” For the purpose of this translation, that is how I have read it.

ai kemun. This would technically be a rhetorical question (“what order is there...?”) but based on Jakdan’s translation of the Ever-Turning Horse Lantern I feel free to decode the rhetorical question as a statement that “there is no order....”