Katae sasu Ou no uranashi hatsuaki ni nari mo narazu mo kaze zo mi ni shimu

English Translation

With one branch put out
the wild pear of Ou stands
and whether or not
the fruit sets, and the fall comes
the wind goes through me alike

Meaning

The wild pear at Ou puts out its one branch; and whether the fruit sets or not, whether autumn comes or not, the wind goes through me.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 281

Headnote: for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The third poem on the end of summer. Whether the fruit sets and whether the season turns are held in one word, and either way the wind is felt. The headnote assigns it to the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
Kunaikyo was a lady-in-waiting to Retired Emperor Go-Toba and died young. In Book One she is the poet of the fourth and seventy-sixth poems and in Book Two of the hundred and twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth and seventy-third; this is her first appearance in this book.
The time is the end of summer; the place is where the wild pear grows at Ou.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The first line means putting out a branch to one side, and gives the shape of the tree.
The second line names a stand of hemp, the word used in the hundred and eighty-fifth poem of Book One and the two hundred and thirty-first of this book, and a kind of pear.
The third line names the season.
The verb in the fourth line does double duty: fruit forming, and a season arriving. It answers both to the pear of the second line and to the early autumn of the third, so that one word carries two lines at once.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive form at the close. The phrase means to go through one, to be felt to the bone. That the conclusion holds either way asserts the certainty of a sensation at the boundary between seasons.

Author

Kunaikyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other