いつしかと荻の葉むけの片寄りに
そそや秋とぞ風も聞こゆる
そそや秋とぞ風も聞こゆる
- Roma-ji
-
Itsushika to ogi no hamuke no katayori ni sosoya aki to zo kaze mo kikoyuru
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Before I knew it the reed leaves are all leaning one way, and in the wind too I hear it: there, autumn.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 286
Headnote: on the theme of early autumn, in a hundred-poem sequence.
A run on the reed and the autumn wind begins here. The plant comes into ear in autumn, and the sound of wind through it was held to announce the season. Reeds appear in the two hundred and seventy-seventh and seventy-eighth poems of Book Three as well, where the subject was an autumn not yet in ear. The headnote assigns this poem to a hundred-poem sequence.
Retired Emperor Sutoku was the eldest son of Emperor Toba; defeated in the Hogen disturbance, he was exiled to Sanuki. In Book One he is the poet of the seventy-first poem and in Book Two of the hundred and thirty-first.
The time is the beginning of autumn; the place is where reeds grow.
The occasion was the hundred-poem sequence.
The fourth line of the text does not agree with the phonetic line beside it; the reading of the text itself is followed here and taken as an exclamation.
The first line means before one knew it, and also already: the season has changed unnoticed.
The word in the second line means the way the leaves face, turned all one way by the wind.
The third line means leaning to one side. Where the previous poem took the turning of a leaf's underside for its sign, this one takes the tilt of the leaves. In both, the wind is known not directly but by the state of the leaves.
The word in the fourth line is an exclamation, something like there, look. Human words are heard in the sound of the wind, as they were heard in birds' voices in the hundred and ninth poem of Book One and the hundred and ninety-fourth of Book Three. An emphatic particle follows.
The attributive form at the close answers that particle. The particle before it carries the sense of the wind as well as the leaves, so that a sign for the eye and a sign for the ear are laid together.
- Author
- Retired Emperor Sutoku
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- On Mimuro hill where the god has his dwelling the arrowroot vine turns its leaves' undersides up and so the 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
- I have always heard this wind at the foot of hills or so I had thought and yet from yesterday it is changed, this wind off the slopes