いかにせん来ぬ夜あまたの時鳥
待たじと思へば村雨の空
待たじと思へば村雨の空
- Roma-ji
-
Ika ni semu konu yo amata no hototogisu mataji to omoeba murasame no sora
- English Translation
-
What am I to do
so many nights it has not
come, the cuckoo, and
just as I resolve to wait
no more, a squall fills the sky
- Meaning
- What am I to do? So many nights it has not come; and just as I decide to wait no longer, the sky fills with a passing shower.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 214
Headnote: topic unknown.
The moment the poet gives up waiting, the sky turns to the very weather in which the bird sings. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Fujiwara no Ietaka was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. In Book One he is the poet of the seventeenth, thirty-seventh, forty-fifth and eighty-second poems, and in Book Two of the hundred and thirteenth, hundred and thirty-ninth and hundred and fifty-eighth.
The time is a summer night; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The cuckoo was held to call on rainy nights, so that a sky of passing showers was the condition in which its voice was expected.
The first line asks what is to be done, and puts bewilderment first.
The second line means that the nights of its not coming have piled up, as in the two hundred and fifth poem and the hundred and ninety-ninth.
The third line names the bird.
The auxiliary in the fourth line expresses negative intention: I will wait no longer. The movement of giving up is set out.
The poem closes on a noun. The word names a shower that falls suddenly and passes. That the sky should turn just then is left as a scene and not explained, the question of the first line hangs unanswered, and the state of being unable to stop waiting is what remains.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Ietaka
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- It has gone on past the cuckoo of Shinoda's wood, and left behind on my sleeve the dripping that has not once ceased to fall there
- There is a voice, yes choking on the roads of cloud the cuckoo, and are those its tears that come pouring in the squall of early night
- Cuckoo, I find still I cannot think ill of you here in the evening outside the village, hearing you crying somewhere within