時鳥声待つ程は片岡の
杜の雫に立ちや濡れまし
杜の雫に立ちや濡れまし
- Roma-ji
-
Hototogisu koe matsu hodo wa Kataoka no mori no shizuku ni tachi ya nuremashi
- English Translation
-
While I wait to hear
the cuckoo lift up its voice
shall I go and stand
under Kataoka's grove
and let its dripping wet me
- Meaning
- While I wait for the cuckoo's voice, shall I stand under the grove at Kataoka and let the drops from the leaves soak me?
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 191
Headnote: when she had gone to Kamo and someone said they wished the cuckoo would sing, and the tree-tops at Kataoka looked lovely at daybreak.
The subject is waiting for the cuckoo. The headnote records a pilgrimage to Kamo at which a companion wished aloud for the bird's call while the tops of the trees at Kataoka showed beautifully in the early light.
Murasaki Shikibu is known as the author of the Tale of Genji. A daughter of Fujiwara no Tametoki, she served Empress Shoshi, consort of Emperor Ichijo. Daini no Sanmi, named in the headnote to the forty-eighth poem of Book One, was her daughter.
The time is a summer daybreak; the place is Kataoka in Yamashiro Province, a grove belonging to the Kamo shrine, distinct from the Kataoka in Yamato of the nineteenth poem in Book One.
The occasion was the wait for the cuckoo during that pilgrimage.
The first two lines mean: for as long as I am waiting for the voice. The waiting itself is set up as the subject.
The third line fixes the place.
The word in the fourth line means drops falling from leaves. Since it is daybreak, the dew of the night is coming down.
In the closing line an interrogative particle stands with an auxiliary of hesitant intention: shall I stand and be wetted, or not? Morozane's hundred and second poem in Book Two uses the same auxiliary.
It is not rain but the dripping of leaves, and the length of the wait is measured by the fact that one could be soaked through by it. The subject of waiting for the voice runs on through the poems that follow.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The grass of summer has grown thick, and even so the cuckoo has not come to my house here, and why has it not given one cry
- 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
- That first call of his coming out of the deep hills the cuckoo's first note at whose house, and by which one of us, is it being heard
- On the hills of May and the deutzia moonlight and the cuckoo's call I hear and am not sated and would have it sing once more