春の夜の夢の浮橋とだえして
峰に別るる横雲の空
峰に別るる横雲の空
- Roma-ji
-
Haru no yo no yume no ukihashi todaeshite mine ni wakaruru yokogumo no sora
- English Translation
-
On a night of spring
the floating bridge of my dream
has broken away
parting from the mountain peak
a band of cloud in the sky
- Meaning
- The floating bridge of a spring night's dream has broken off, and a band of cloud is drawing away from the mountain peak into the sky.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 38
Headnote: composed among fifty poems set by Cloistered Prince Shukaku.
Sharing its final line with the poem before, this one is placed as its companion. But it does not begin from a landscape; it begins from something inward, the breaking of a dream. The headnote assigns it to a set of fifty poems commissioned by Cloistered Prince Shukaku.
The poet is Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), a son of Shunzei and one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. He is held to have chosen the poems of the Hyakunin Isshu, and he laboured at copying and correcting the classics, the Tale of Genji among them. Prince Shukaku (1150-1202) was a son of Emperor Go-Shirakawa and abbot of Ninna-ji.
The time is a spring daybreak; the place is somewhere in sight of a mountain peak.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The poem is among the best known in the anthology and has been taken up again and again by later commentators and critics.
The first two lines liken a dream on a spring night to a floating bridge, a temporary crossing laid on moored boats, and so to anything unsteady and brief. It is also the title of the last chapter of the Tale of Genji, and that association comes with it.
The third line means to break off partway. A bridge giving out and a dream ending are laid over one another in a single word.
The fourth line shows cloud drawing away from a mountain peak. The previous poem had cloud parting from waves; here it parts from a summit.
The close is a noun, the same as the previous poem's. The breaking of the dream and the parting of the cloud share one motion, and an inward event is carried over into the outward scene.
Dream, bridge and cloud are all things without fixed shape, and by stacking them the poem makes indistinctness itself its subject.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Teika
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- When I look across the foot of the hills grows dim by Minase's stream why did I ever suppose that evening belonged to fall
- The haze is rising on Sue no Matsuyama faintly, dimly now parting away from the waves a band of cloud in the sky
- Can he know of it that gazing at the hazed sky I grieve for a spring in which no blossom has come to give the air its fragrance
- The whole of the sky hazes with the plum's fragrance and will not cloud through so that it hangs half hidden the moon of a night in spring