Hisagi ouru katayamakage ni shinobitsutsu fukikeru mono o aki no yūkaze

English Translation

In the shade of hills
where the hisagi trees grow
secretly, all this
while it had been blowing here
the evening wind of autumn

Meaning

In the shade of the low hills where the hisagi grow it had been blowing all along, keeping out of sight: the evening wind of autumn.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 274

Headnote: composed on taking the cool, for a contest held by Yorisuke, Minister of Justice.
The subject is the stealthy approach of the autumn wind. The topic is the taking of coolness. Fujiwara no Yorisuke, who held the contest, is the poet of the hundred and thirty-second piece and appears in the headnote to the fifty-ninth poem of Book One.
The Monk Shune was a son of Minamoto no Toshiyori and a monk of Todai-ji, who kept a poetry salon at his own quarters. In Book One he is the poet of the sixth poem and in Book Two of the hundred and forty-second. Toshiyori, poet of the two hundred and sixty-sixth, was his father.
The time is an evening at the end of summer; the place is the shade of a low hill.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
The hisagi is a tree, and the hillside where it grows was written of as a cool place.

The first line describes the ground.
The word in the second line means a low hill with flat land on one side, and its shade is out of the sun and cool.
The verb in the third line means to keep out of sight, with a continuative particle: the autumn wind had been blowing where it would not be noticed. It is given the manner of a person.
The fourth line joins an exclamatory auxiliary to a concessive particle: and all the while it had been so.
The poem closes on a noun, so that the subject comes last, in inversion. After the previous poem, in which the autumn wind passed among reed roots, this one has it blowing where no one sees. Both hold that autumn has already begun in places out of view.

Author

The Monk Shune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other