The Sled

I’ve been laboring over a Jakdan poem on snow, but needed to take a break, so here’s another fun Staatsbibliothek poem. As it happens, this weekend I went sledding in the mountains, so it’s seasonally quite appropriate.

This poem is composed of four couplets with seven-syllable lines and an A-rhyme. The sled portrayed in this poem seems to have wooden struts (mooi bangtu) and iron runners (selei siren), perhaps something like the sleds shown in the image below, which comes from an article at kaiwind.com.

	huncu [冰床] be irgebuhengge		Verses on the Sled
	Staatsbibliothek 14.2 (View Online)
	sejen jahūdai waka		Neither cart nor boat,
	mukei oilo icangga,		but comfortable on the surface of the water.
	tecenduci jalupi		We sat together and filled it up,
	yaburede hahiba		and when we went it was quick.
5	mooi bangtu garsa nio		Aren’t the wooden struts clever?
	selei siren nilhūn ya		The iron runners are slick indeed!
	jugūn akū yun akū		With neither road nor track,
	elemangga hafu ja.		it nonetheless gets through easily.