Kin'yo, an officer of the second rank, had a brother called the High Priest Ryōgaku, an extremely bad-tempered man. Next to his monastery grew a large nettle-tree which occasioned the nickname people gave him, the Nettle-tree High Priest. "That name is outrageous," said the high priest, and cut down the tree. The stump still being left, people referred to him now as the Stump High Priest. More furious than ever, Ryōgaku had the stump dug up and thrown away, but this left a big ditch. People now called him the Ditch High Priest.Translated by Donald Keene in Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967; rpt. 1998), p. 40.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, November 09, 2010
The Ditch High Priest
Yoshida Kenkō (1283-1352), Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) 45: