Iwane kosu Kiyotakigawa no hayakereba nami orikakuru kishi no yamabuki - Shin Kokin Wakashu(English Translation & Meaning)

岩根越す清滝川の早ければ
波折りかくる岸の山吹

Roma-ji: Iwane kosu Kiyotakigawa no hayakereba nami orikakuru kishi no yamabuki
English Translation: Over the bare rock
the Kiyotaki runs fast
and so the water
breaks and folds the branches back
the kerria at the bank
Meaning: The Kiyotaki runs so fast over the rocks that the waves break and bend back the kerria along its bank.
Commentary: Book Two Spring Poems II 160

Headnote: from the time when a hundred poems were presented in the reign of Emperor Horikawa.
The third poem in the run on kerria, on branches bent and broken by a fast current. The headnote assigns it to the Horikawa sequences, from which the tenth and nineteenth poems of Book One and the hundred and twenty-third of this book also come.
The poet, given by his court title, is Minamoto no Kunizane (1069-1111), a son of Minamoto no Akifusa, who rose to Provisional Middle Counsellor. In Book One he is the poet of the tenth poem.
The time is the end of spring; the place is the Kiyotaki River in Yamashiro Province, the same river whose snowmelt Saigyo wrote of in the twenty-seventh poem of Book One.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred poems.

The first line means running over rock; the word for rock set in the ground is the one used in Sutoku's hundred and thirty-first poem.
The second line fixes the place.
The third line gives a settled condition: because the current is fast.
The fourth line has the waves breaking the branches and folding them over, describing the water's action as if it were a hand. It is the pattern of Sutoku's seventy-first poem in Book One, where waves wove the willow into matting: the water is given work to do.
The poem closes on a noun. A swift current and yellow flowers hanging over it hold movement and stillness in one poem. The twenty-seventh poem of Book One took this river at the thaw; here it appears at the end of spring, one season further on.
Author: Minamoto no Kunizane
Source: Shin Kokin Wakashu
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