時鳥なほ一声は思ひ出でよ
老蘇の森の夜半の昔を
老蘇の森の夜半の昔を
- Roma-ji
-
Hototogisu nao hitokoe wa omoiide yo Oiso no mori no yowa no mukashi o
- English Translation
-
Cuckoo, one cry more
and let it call back to mind
in Oiso's wood
the old days, and the deep nights
of years that have grown old now
- Meaning
- Cuckoo, give one cry more, and remember with it the old midnights in the wood at Oiso.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 207
Headnote: among the summer poems, from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The poem calls on the cuckoo to remember the past and to sing. The headnote assigns it to the summer poems of a hundred-poem sequence.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Norimitsu (1154-1213), who served as Minister of Popular Affairs.
The time is a summer night; the place is the wood at Oiso in Omi Province, in what is now Omihachiman in Shiga Prefecture.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line names the one addressed.
The second line means: one cry more, at least. The subject of the single cry, running since the hundred and ninety-fifth poem, appears here as a request for one more.
The third line is an imperative. Inpumon-in no Taifu's hundred and forty-third poem in Book Two used the same words to the flowers; asking remembrance of something that cannot answer recurs through this anthology.
The place name in the fourth line sounds the word for growing old and brings the idea of age with it. Folding a state of mind into a place name is the method of the two hundred and fifth and two hundred and sixth poems as well, so that three run together.
The poem closes on a noun reaching back to the imperative above, in inversion. To tell a bird to remember is to admit that the poet is remembering, and an old man's recollection is conveyed through the sound of a place name.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Norimitsu
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Night upon night now I have waited past waiting and the mountain's bird far off, beyond the cloud-track has given one cry, no more
- Until I have heard a second cry I'll not leave cuckoo, though I lie however many nights here at the anchorage, waking
- That one cry of his I cannot have done with it cuckoo, at the hour of dusk, when the clouds go by and nothing is certain there
- Cold as the dawn moon that once looked on me, it has come out, and the bird the mountain cuckoo, has not and still the night is waiting