Ukaibune takase sashikosu hodo nare ya musubōreyuku kagaribi no kage

English Translation

The cormorant boats
are they poling up the shoals
and past them just now
for the light of the fishing
fires is knotting as it goes

Meaning

Are the cormorant boats poling over the shallows? The light of the fishing fires goes tangled and unsteady.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 252

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, on cormorant fishing.
The second poem on cormorant fishing. From the unsteadiness of the torchlight the poet infers that the boats are crossing the shallows. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The Monk Jakuren was a nephew and adopted son of Fujiwara no Shunzei and later took orders. He was appointed one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu but died before it was finished. In Book One he is the poet of the fifty-eighth and eighty-seventh poems and in Book Two of the hundred and fifty-fourth and others.
The time is a summer night; the place is a river where the fishing is carried on.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The first line repeats the opening of the previous poem, so that two pieces begin alike and stand together.
The second line names the shallows and the poling of a boat; Kintsune's seventy-second poem in Book One uses the same phrase.
An interrogative particle in the third line reasons toward a cause: is it because of that?
The verb in the fourth line means to be tangled and not come free, and also to be unlit or clouded in spirit; here it describes the wavering of the firelight.
The poem closes on a noun; the word used means light. The movement of the boats is not seen and is known from the disorder of the fires, the method of the cuckoo poems earlier in this book, where a voice alone was the evidence, transferred here to light.

Author

The Monk Jakuren

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other