二声と鳴きつと聞かば時鳥
衣かたしきうたた寝はせん
衣かたしきうたた寝はせん
- Roma-ji
-
Futakoe to nakitsu to kikaba hototogisu koromo katashiki utatane wa semu
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- If I could hear you call a second time, cuckoo, I would spread one sleeve of my robe and doze a while.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 197
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
One cry not being enough, the poem offers to sleep if a second comes. It is the subject of Yakamochi's hundred and ninety-fifth poem, put another way. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Minamoto no Tsunenobu, who rose to Major Counsellor and was accomplished in Chinese verse and music as well as poetry. In Book Two he is the poet of the hundred and twenty-second and hundred and forty-eighth poems.
The time is a summer night; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first two lines join a perfect auxiliary to a conditional: if I could be sure of hearing it twice. The implication is that one cry does not feel like hearing at all.
The third line names the bird.
The fourth line means to spread one sleeve of a robe and lie on it. Two people would spread their sleeves across each other; one sleeve alone means sleeping alone, and the phrase belongs chiefly to love poetry.
The word in the closing line means a light sleep taken without properly going to bed, with an auxiliary of intention. Since he is sitting up for the voice, two cries would let him rest.
The hundred and ninety-fifth poem said that one cry made sleep impossible; this one says that two would make it possible, and the two treat one lack from opposite sides.
- Author
- Minamoto no Tsunenobu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Not yet at its ease the cuckoo's half-hidden voice and it is only I, who wait for one who won't come at all, who am hearing
- Even having heard I cannot sleep after all cuckoo, for my heart has grown used to it, through those many nights I lay in wait