Watatsumi no naka ni zo tateru saoshika wa aki no yamabe ya soko ni miyuramu

English Translation

The stag that is standing
there in the middle of the
sea — is it that the
autumn hills are to be seen
there, in that place, on that floor

Meaning

The stag standing there in the middle of the sea — is it that the autumn hills can be seen there, down on that floor?

Commentary

128 The Autumn Hills

On another occasion a company of poetry enthusiasts gathered and deliberately set the Lady of Higaki a difficult opening verse, to make her supply the close. The opening given was about a stag standing in the middle of the sea, and she added the lines that complete the poem here. 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, and the hundred and twenty-seventh of her composing to a set topic at the deputy's residence.
The setting is the gathering of enthusiasts, who set her an impossible scene: a stag standing in the sea.
What prompted the poem was the demand for a closing verse to that opening — an improvisation.
The section ends with the poem; no reaction and no later event is recorded. It is one of the rare poems in this book made by two hands, in the linked form where one supplies the opening and another the close.

The opening verse, set for her, has a stag standing in the middle of the sea — an impossibility offered in order to leave her without an answer.
Her closing turns on a single word which means both that place and the floor or bed of the water. That word is what makes the opening verse work.
If the autumn hills are reflected on the surface, then the stag stands on the reflected hillside, and a stag in the sea is accounted for; or the stag may be looking at hills on the water's floor.
An opening set as a trap is met with one pun, and the finished poem reads as though sea, autumn leaves and stag had been planned together from the start. The section presents it as an improvised riposte before a company who meant to test someone beneath them.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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