Sanae toru yamada no kakei morinikeri hiku shimenawa ni tsuyu zo koboruru

English Translation

Where they take the shoots
the pipe in the mountain field
has sprung a leak now
and along the sacred rope
the drops are spilling over

Meaning

The water pipe at the mountain field, where they are taking up the seedlings, has begun to leak, and the drops are spilling along the rope drawn across it.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 225

Headnote: on the theme of rice seedlings on the mountain terraces.
A run on the rice fields begins here. The topic is seedlings on hill terraces, and the poem shows water leaking from the conduit and falling on the rope drawn across the ground.
The poet, given by his court title, is Minamoto no Tsunenobu; this is his third appearance in this book, after the hundred and ninety-seventh and two hundred and twenty-second poems.
The time is the season of transplanting; the place is a field among the hills.
The occasion was the set topic.
A marked rope was drawn to show sacred ground or a claim to a place, and in a field it barred others from entering. It is the same idea as the marking of the herb fields in the eleventh and twelfth poems of Book One.

The first line means taking seedlings up from the nursery bed, the work done just before transplanting.
The word in the second line names a conduit laid across to carry water.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line marks the discovery that it has been leaking.
The fourth line names the rope drawn across the ground.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive verb at the close. The word for dew here means the drops leaking from the pipe. Two implements of human work, the conduit and the rope, are set together with water falling on them: a scene of labour. Among poems chiefly about flowers and birds, taking field work for material connects this piece with Shomyo's sixty-seventh poem in Book One.

Author

Minamoto no Tsunenobu

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other