Kikade tada nenamashi mono o hototogisu nakanaka nari ya yowa no hitokoe

English Translation

I should have just slept
and never heard it at all
cuckoo, for it leaves
everything half done, that one
cry of yours in the deep night

Meaning

I should have gone to sleep and never heard it. That single cry in the depth of the night, cuckoo, was worse than none.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 203

Headnote: topic unknown.
Having heard only one cry, the poet is left the less satisfied. It is the subject of the hundred and ninety-fifth and hundred and ninety-seventh poems, stated more directly. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Sagami was a lady-in-waiting and poet of the mid-Heian period; her dates are not recorded. She is known by that name from her marriage to Oe no Kinyori, governor of Sagami.
The time is the middle of a summer night; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first line means: without hearing it, simply.
The second line joins an auxiliary of contrary-to-fact supposition to a concessive and exclamatory particle: I should have slept and not heard, and now it is too late.
The third line names the bird.
The phrase in the fourth line means that a thing half done is worse than not done at all, with an exclamatory particle.
The poem closes on a noun, so that what is being judged comes last, in inversion. The hundred and ninety-fifth poem could not sleep for one cry and the hundred and ninety-seventh would sleep for two; this one regrets having heard the one. Three poems handle a single lack by degrees, and this is its furthest point.

Author

Sagami

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other