Waka poetry as a playground for words. About mono-no na poems and strategies of translating them

Japanese poetry, waka, has a strong comical, imaginative and creative side, based not only on a subject matter and vocabulary, but also on many types of rhetoric devices, such as kakekotoba, pivot words, or engo, associative words. One more method of enriching the poem was so called mono-no na, literally, “names of things” or acrostics, called also kakushidai, “hidden topic”, because a word given as topic was interwoven into the words of the poem. When the topic was already known, the fun part was not to guess it, but to find it, sometimes divided between two or more words, and enjoy the polysemy it created. The division of Mono-no na-no uta for the first time appears in Kokin wakashū (vol. 10) and then in Shūi wakashū (1005) and other anthologies. In this paper I will introduce this rhetoric device and discuss the difficulties and possibilities of translating the mono-no na or butsumeika poems into foreign languages, using as the examples works of renown translators, but also my own attempts at both translating a poem with a wordplay and making it a good poem.