谷川の打ち出づる波も声立てつ
鴬さそへ春の山風
鴬さそへ春の山風
- Roma-ji
-
Tanigawa no uchiizuru nami mo koe tatetsu uguisu sasoe haru no yamakaze
- English Translation
-
The mountain river
even its waves break and speak
they have found a voice
come, call the warbler out now
you wind off the hills of spring
- Meaning
- Even the waves that have broken out of the valley stream have found a voice at last. Now call out the warbler too, wind from the spring hills.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 17
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
Here begins a run of poems on the warbler. This one catches the moment when ice in a valley stream has broken and the water has begun to sound, and waits on that sound for the bird's voice to follow. The headnote refers to the hundred poems presented to Retired Emperor Go-Toba, the Shoji sequences of 1200.
Fujiwara no Ietaka (1158-1237), a son of Fujiwara no Mitsutaka, studied poetry under Fujiwara no Shunzei. He was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu and is spoken of alongside Teika. He is remembered for continuing to exchange poems with Go-Toba even after the Jokyu disturbance.
The season is early spring; the place is a stream in a mountain valley.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
Forty-three of Ietaka's poems entered the Shin Kokin Wakashu.
The first two lines describe waves that have broken out through the ice of a valley stream. The phrasing follows a poem in the Kokin Wakashu in which waves appearing through the gaps of thawing ice are seen as the first blossoms of spring.
A perfect auxiliary in the third line states flatly that the sound has been made. The particle carries the sense of even the waves, implying something that has not yet spoken: the warbler of the lines below.
The fourth line is an imperative, and the poem turns on it. Description gives way to direct address, and the waiting comes to the front.
The poem closes on a noun, so that the one addressed is named only afterwards, in inversion. Water sounds first, and the bird's voice, still unheard, is entrusted to the wind; the whole poem is organised around hearing.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Ietaka
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
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- Not the tender herbs that grow in the marshy fields and yet all in vain as I pile the years up too my sleeves have grown wet with tears
- At Sasanami the shore pines of Shiga stand grown old with the years in whose reign were they pulled up on some first day of the Rat
- The warbler is here and sings, yet the snow still falls and under its weight the cedar leaves have gone white on Osaka's mountainside
- Now that spring has come take them for blossoms, it says and on Kataoka's upper leaves of the pine trees the light snow is falling still