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

Other