漁火の昔の光ほの見えて
芦屋の里に飛ぶ蛍かな
芦屋の里に飛ぶ蛍かな
- Roma-ji
-
Isaribi no mukashi no hikari hono miete Ashiya no sato ni tobu hotaru kana
- English Translation
-
The light that of old
the fishing fires gave, faintly
showing once again
in Ashiya village here
the fireflies are flying now
- Meaning
- Faintly the old light of the fishing fires shows again: fireflies over the village of Ashiya.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 255
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
A run on fireflies begins here, carried on from the torches and fishing fires of the previous run: the two are joined by the light of fires at night. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune; this is his fourth appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninth, twentieth and twenty-sixth poems.
The time is a summer night; the place is the village of Ashiya in Settsu Province, in what is now Ashiya in Hyogo, near the sea and known from the Tales of Ise, where it appears with the fires of the fisherfolk.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line names the fires burnt in boats for fishing, taking up the torches of the previous run so that the two runs are joined.
The second line means the light of the fires once burnt at this place: what is no longer to be seen is brought forward as memory.
The third line means faintly visible. What is actually seen is the light of fireflies, and it is taken for the old fires.
The fourth line fixes the place, and the name calls up the old tale attached to it.
The poem closes on a noun with an exclamatory particle. A firefly's small light is seen as the remnant of the fires of long ago, and a difference of scale stands for a distance in time. Where the run on orange since the two hundred and thirty-eighth poem called up the past by scent, here light does the same work.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Yoshitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Down the Oi, poles and torches, the cormorant boats are going on and at how many shallows will they see the night through here
- On that river up in the far heavens, the boats of the cormorants what have they promised, and why do they wait for the darkness
- Close by my window the wind is playing over the bamboo's leaves, and at that sound it is shorter still, this dream of a light sleep
- Close by my window the little clump of bamboo and when the wind blows I wake and think it autumn out of a summer night's dream