Shika no ne wa ikura bakari no kurenai zo furiizuru kara ni yama no somuramu

English Translation

How deep a crimson
can the voice of the stag be
that with each calling
he sends out, the mountainside
turns another shade of red

Meaning

How deep a crimson can a stag's voice be, that with each call he sends out the mountainside turns redder?

Commentary

127 The Voice of the Stag

The same Lady of Higaki composed this poem when she was told, at the residence of the Governor-General's deputy at the Dazaifu, to make a poem on the autumn leaves. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The Lady of Higaki was a woman of pleasure living in Tsukushi, accomplished and worldly-wise. She appears in three consecutive sections, the hundred and twenty-sixth through hundred and twenty-eighth. The hundred and twenty-sixth section tells of her ruin in the rising. The deputy was the second officer at the Dazaifu, and the residence was his official house.
The setting is that residence, where autumn leaves had been set as the subject.
What prompted the poem was being told to compose on them — a poem to a set topic.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded. The hundred and twenty-eighth section gives another occasion on which she was set a difficulty.

The stag's voice is that of the deer belling in autumn; the animal was said to call for its mate, and had long been part of the autumn scene in poetry.
The question of how deep a crimson it is assumes, without preamble, that a voice has a colour.
The verb in the fourth line means to send a voice out, to give tongue, and the phrase after it means the instant one does so.
The closing supposes the mountain turning colour. Each call reddens the hillside a shade further. The conceit of making the stag's voice the cause of the autumn leaves is the whole of the poem, and to treat a voice as a colour that dyes a mountain is the ingenuity the set topic called for.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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