たつた川もみぢ葉流る神なびの
みむろの山にしぐれ降るらし
みむろの山にしぐれ降るらし
- Roma-ji
-
Tatsutagawa momijiba nagaru kannabi no Mimuro no yama ni shigure fururashi
- English Translation
-
Down the Tatsuta
the autumn leaves are floating —
then on the sacred
hill of Mimuro, it seems
the cold rains must be falling
- Meaning
- Down the Tatsuta the autumn leaves are floating; so on the sacred hill of Mimuro the cold rains must be falling.
- Commentary
-
151 The Tatsuta River
The same emperor at Nara, looking at the fine autumn leaves on the Tatsuta river, heard Kakinomoto no Hitomaro compose "Tatsutagawa momijiba nagaru kannabi no Mimuro no yama ni shigure fururashi", and himself composed "Tatsutagawa momiji midarete nagarumeri wataraba nishiki naka ya taenamu". That is the whole of the section.
The emperor at Nara is the emperor of the Nara capital, who appears in the hundred and fiftieth section. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro is the great poet of the Man'yō-shū, who composes at the Sarusawa pond in that section. The Tatsuta river flows through Yamato and was famous for its autumn leaves; the sacred hill of Mimuro stands above it.
The setting is the Tatsuta river, with the leaves at their finest.
What prompted the poem was the emperor's looking at them.
He answered it, and the section closes with the two poems. This one was later included in the Kokin-shū and the Shūi-shū.
The opening states plainly what is in front of him: leaves floating down the Tatsuta.
The sacred hill of Mimuro is where a god is held to dwell; it lies upstream, and is where the leaves come from.
The closing infers that the cold rains are falling there, in a grammar of inference from evidence.
From what can be seen downstream he reasons to what cannot be seen upstream. Telling of the unseen by way of the seen is the frame of the whole poem.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- That the sleep-tangled hair of the girl I loved should be what I see now as the jewelled weed of the pond at Sarusawa: the grief
- The Sarusawa pond is unfeeling too — if she went down and took the jewelled weed upon her the water should have dried up
- Down the Tatsuta the autumn leaves come scattered and tangled, it seems — and were I to cross, that brocade would surely part in the middle
- What is thought and not spoken — that is the greater by far, and I say nothing: not of Iwate not of the bird, nothing more