照りもせず曇りも果てぬ春の夜の
朧月夜にしくものぞなき
朧月夜にしくものぞなき
- Roma-ji
-
Teri mo sezu kumori mo hatenu haru no yo no oborozukiyo ni shiku mono zo naki
- English Translation
-
Neither shining out
nor clouding wholly over
on a night of spring
nothing is a match for it
the moon of a misted night
- Meaning
- It neither shines out nor clouds over entirely: nothing can equal the misted moon of a spring night.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 55
Headnote: composed on the line about a moon neither bright nor dark, dimly veiled, from the poem on a spring night at Jialing in the Collected Works.
Here begins the run on the misted moon. The poem takes a line of Chinese verse as its topic and recasts it in Japanese, declaring the beauty of a hazed moon beyond anything else. The Collected Works of the headnote are those of Bai Juyi.
Oe no Chisato was an early Heian poet who left many poems written to lines of Chinese verse set as topics.
The time is a spring night; no place is given.
The occasion was the exercise of turning a Chinese line into a Japanese poem.
The phrase about not clouding through appears again in Teika's fortieth poem, a sign that this piece was taken up by later poets.
The first two lines render the Chinese phrase directly into Japanese. Two negatives placed together give a state neither bright nor dark. The verb means to do a thing completely, and it is negated.
The third and fourth lines answer to the Chinese words for a dimly veiled moon, and the topic itself is set at the poem's centre.
The verb at the close means to equal or come up to, and an emphatic particle governs the negative in the attributive form: there is nothing to match it, a superlative.
The Chinese line is divided between the upper and lower halves and a Japanese verdict is added at the end, in the manner proper to poems written on Chinese lines. Taking an in-between state as the standard of beauty set the key for the poems on the misted moon that follow.
- Author
- Oe no Chisato
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Once it has fallen only the fragrance is left and as if the plum were still there, over my sleeve the wind of the spring blows on
- Alone, only I gazed at them, and they have gone the plum's flowers fell and no one who knows enough to know them came to visit
- A pale, shallow green the blossoms too hazing there into a single thing, and dimly to be seen the moon of a night of spring
- At Naniwa bay even waves that do not haze have hazed over now reflecting and clouding both under a misted spring moon