If only the poets of Chinese Antiquity had had video chat, right?

渭樹江雲
i.ju.kou.un

Literally: Wei river – tree – large river – cloud

Alternately: To miss, to think fondly of, or to worry about a friend who is far away. Truly a yojijukugo for our times.

Notes: This is another gift from our poetic friend Du Fu (Japanese 杜甫 = To Ho). The compound is contracted from the actual verse, which goes 渭北春天樹 / 江東日暮雲: the speaker is looking out on trees north of the Wei River, while his friend Li Bai (李白, Japanese Ri Haku) is (imagined as) watching the sunset clouds from east of the Yangtze River. Different elements of the same verse may be extracted to produce the synonymous compound 春樹暮雲 (shun ju bou un) or its flipped version 暮雲春樹 (bou un shun ju).

Alert readers may have noticed that we’ve come to ゐ (wi) in the iroha ordering, and I was relieved after significant searching to that 渭 used to have ヰ (wi) as its onyomi (Chinese-style reading) and is used as the first character of an appealing, not-too-desperately-obscure compound.

The problem is that it also turns out that the very first compound I used in this current series, 葦編三絶, also starts with a character that used to be read as ヰ. Which means that I owe you a post with a character read as い (i) even in the pre-reform orthography that used characters like ゐ (and) ゑ).

Why yes, there IS a pseudo-historical manga about it starring the poets as pretty boys.