時鳥一声鳴きて往ぬる夜は
いかでか人の寝を安く寝る
いかでか人の寝を安く寝る
- Roma-ji
-
Hototogisu hitokoe nakite inuru yo wa ikadeka hito no i o yasuku nuru
- English Translation
-
On a night when one
cry of the cuckoo is heard
and the bird has gone
how can anyone at all
go on sleeping easily
- Meaning
- On a night when the cuckoo has cried once and gone, how is anyone to sleep at ease?
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 195
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
Having heard a single cry and no more, the poet cannot sleep. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Otomo no Yakamochi, a Nara-period poet thought to have had a large hand in compiling the Man'yoshu. In Book One he is the poet of the twentieth and eighty-fifth poems, and in Book Two of the hundred and fifty-first.
The time is a summer night; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first two lines give a single cry and no more. Against the hundred and eighty-ninth poem, in which not one cry came, this one has exactly one, so that the two cover the cases of none and of one.
The verb closing the second line means to go away, and marks the bird's departure.
The phrase in the third and fourth lines means how, and answers to the negative sense below.
The closing line doubles the noun for sleep with the verb for sleeping: to sleep at ease. Mitsune's hundred and sixth poem in Book Two uses the same turn; there sleep was broken by dreams of blossom, here by a bird.
One cry is not enough and leaves the hearer more wakeful than before, an argument taken up again in the hundred and ninety-seventh and two hundred and third poems.
- Author
- Otomo no Yakamochi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Longing for its mate it calls and goes on calling in the dark of May the mountain cuckoo crying on the hill of Kannabi
- Calling as it comes out of the mountains, and so in the wooded hills the pinks of Yamato must have come into bloom, it seems
- If I could but hear the cuckoo call a second time, then I would spread one sleeve of my robe alone and take a light sleep on it