鵜飼舟あはれとぞ思ふ武士の
八十宇治川の夕闇の空
八十宇治川の夕闇の空
- Roma-ji
-
Ukaibune aware to zo omou mononofu no yaso Ujikawa no yūyami no sora
- English Translation
-
The cormorant boats
and how moving they are, and
the sky at dusk there
over the river Uji
of the eighty warrior clans
- Meaning
- The cormorant boats move me: the sky at dusk over the Uji, river of the eighty warrior clans.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 251
Headnote: composed on cormorant fishing, for a hundred-poem contest at the residence of the Regent and Chancellor.
A run on cormorant fishing begins here. The topic named is the river on which it is carried on. The headnote places the poem at Yoshitsune's hundred-poem contest, the gathering of the twenty-third and thirty-seventh poems of Book One and the hundred and forty-seventh of Book Two.
The poet, given as former Archbishop, is Jien; this is his third appearance in this book, after the hundred and seventy-seventh and two hundred and forty-second poems.
The time is a summer dusk; the place is the Uji River in Yamashiro Province. Cormorant fishing was carried on at night by torchlight, and the Uji was famous for it.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
The second line of the text does not agree with the phonetic line given beside it; the reading of the text itself is followed here.
The first line names the boats.
The word in the second line means a deep, moved feeling, with an emphatic particle governing the attributive verb.
The third and fourth lines carry a long pillow word attaching to the name of the river: the warrior families in imperial service were said to number eighty, and the sound of that phrase leads into the place name. The weight of the pillow word supports the weight of the river's name.
The poem closes on a noun. Since the fishing is done in darkness by torchlight, dusk is the hour at which it begins. That a monk should call a business of killing fish a moving sight says something of the writer's position.
- Author
- Jien
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Prev Poem
-
Waga yado no sotomo ni tateru nara no ha no shigemi ni suzumu natsu wa kinikeri
- Next Poem
-
Ukaibune takase sashikosu hodo nare ya musubōreyuku kagaribi no kage