神なびのみむろの山の葛かづら
うら吹き返す秋は来にけり
うら吹き返す秋は来にけり
- Roma-ji
-
Kannabi no mimuro no yama no kuzukazura ura fukikaesu aki wa kinikeri
- English Translation
-
On Mimuro hill
where the god has his dwelling
the arrowroot vine
turns its leaves' undersides up
and so the autumn has come
- Meaning
- On the sacred hill of Mimuro the wind turns up the pale undersides of the arrowroot leaves: autumn has come.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 285
Headnote: topic unknown.
This poem opens Book Four, the first book of autumn poems. Following the summer section, a poem announcing the turn of the season is set first. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The poet, given by his court title, is Otomo no Yakamochi, a Nara-period poet thought to have had a large hand in compiling the Man'yoshu. In Book One he is the poet of the twentieth and eighty-fifth poems, in Book Two of the hundred and fifty-first, and in Book Three of the hundred and ninety-fifth.
The time is the beginning of autumn; the place is the hill of Mimuro at Kannabi. The first name means a hill where a god dwells, used also in the hundred and sixty-first and hundred and ninety-fourth poems of Book Three; the second means the chamber of a god, and both mark the ground as sacred.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first two lines set the poem on a sacred hill.
The third line names the trailing vine of the arrowroot. Its leaves are pale beneath, and when the wind turns them they show white.
The word in the fourth line means the underside of a leaf. By turning the leaves the wind, which cannot be seen, becomes visible. The two hundred and ninetieth poem uses the same device, saying that the wind has no colour to be seen.
The closing words answer to the announcement of summer in the hundred and seventy-fifth and two hundred and fiftieth poems of Book Three, with an exclamatory auxiliary marking the surprise of noticing. The opening poem of Book One ends with the same flat declaration for spring, and the form recurs at the head of each seasonal book.
A single sign, the turning of a leaf, is enough to declare the season, the method of the poem that opens Book Three, where a white robe served.
- Author
- Otomo no Yakamochi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The fan of summer ending, and the white dew of autumn: which of them will be the first to be laid down, I wonder, of the two
- Where the rites are done I look at the river's shoals and, robe of Cathay as the day goes down and cords are loosed, the waves are rising
- Already, and see how the reed leaves are all turned and lean the one way there, there it is, in the wind I hear that autumn has come
- In the single night I slept, it seems the autumn has come after all for the wind at daybreak here is not what it was before