Naku koe o e ya wa shinobanu hototogisu hatsu u no hana no kage ni kakurete

English Translation

That voice of yours, why
can you not hold it in, then
cuckoo, hidden there
in the shadow of the first
flowers of the deutzia

Meaning

Why can you not keep your voice in, cuckoo, hidden away as you are in the shade of the season's first deutzia?

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 190

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
This poem opens the long run on the cuckoo. Where the previous poem complained that not one cry had been heard, this one gives a bird that hides itself and cannot keep its voice down. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Kakinomoto no Hitomaro was a poet of the Asuka period and the greatest figure of the Man'yoshu. The Japanese preface to the Kokin Wakashu names him among the masters of the art. The poem behind the ninety-ninth piece of Book One is also attributed to him.
The time is early summer; the place is where deutzia is in flower.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first line names the object.
In the second line an adverb of impossibility, requiring a negative, stands with a rhetorical particle: how can you not hold it back? The contradiction is that the bird conceals its body and cannot conceal its voice.
The third line names the one addressed.
The prefix in the fourth line means the first of the year, as in Yakamochi's eighty-fifth poem in Book One on the first cherry. The deutzia of the hundred and eightieth and hundred and eighty-first poems reappears here as the bird's hiding place.
The poem closes without a full stop, on the state of being hidden. A voice heard and a body unseen is the basic situation of the cuckoo poems, and the run that follows turns on this invisible bird.

Author

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other