わが心いかにせよとて時鳥
雲間の月の影に鳴くらん
雲間の月の影に鳴くらん
- Roma-ji
-
Waga kokoro ika ni se yo tote hototogisu kumoma no tsuki no kage ni nakuramu
- English Translation
-
What would you have me
do with this heart of mine, then
cuckoo, that you cry
there in the light of the moon
that shows between the cloud-breaks
- Meaning
- What am I to do with my heart, that you should be crying there in the moonlight between the clouds, cuckoo?
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 210
Headnote: composed and sent when he wrote ten poems at the residence of the Later Tokudaiji Minister of the Left.
The disturbance the bird's voice makes is put as a question to the bird. The headnote places the poem among ten written at the residence of Fujiwara no Sanesada, who is the poet of the two hundred and nineteenth piece.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei; this is his third appearance in this book, after the two hundred and first and two hundred and second poems.
The time is a summer night; no place is given.
The occasion was the writing of the ten poems.
The first line makes the heart the subject and the second asks what is to be done with it. A quotative particle makes the bird seem to be saying so. In the two hundred and first poem Shunzei ordered the cuckoo not to add its tears; here he asks instead, so that one poet takes both a command and a question to the same bird.
The third line names it.
The fourth line means in the moonlight coming through a break in the cloud. The phrase is Shirakawa's, from the hundred and eightieth poem, where deutzia was seen as that light; here it is where the bird is.
The auxiliary at the close expresses present conjecture. Nothing is seen, and the bird's place is reasoned out from its voice alone. As in the two hundredth and two hundred and second poems, it is set somewhere out of reach, among moon and cloud.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- The cuckoo has cried and gone behind the ridgeline and that ridge is now more hateful to me than when it was the moon that went in
- The dawn moon has come though I did not wait for it and still, deep within the mountains, it has not come the cuckoo I have waited