Sode hichite waga te ni musubu mizu no omo ni amatsu hoshiai no sora o miru kana

English Translation

My sleeve gets soaking
and in the water I hold
cupped in my own hands
I am looking at the sky
where the stars of heaven meet

Meaning

With my sleeve wet through, in the water cupped in my hands I look at the sky where the stars of heaven are meeting.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 316

Headnote: when he presented a Tanabata poem in the reign of Emperor Kazan.
The fourth poem on Tanabata. The sky of the meeting is looked at in water held in the hands. The headnote records the occasion as a Tanabata poem for Emperor Kazan.
Fujiwara no Nagato, whose dates are unrecorded, was a mid-Heian poet, said to have taught poetry to the Monk Noin.
The time is the night of the seventh day of the seventh month; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the poem.
The model is Ki no Tsurayuki's poem in the Kokin Wakashu about water once cupped in wet sleeves, now frozen, that the wind of the first spring day may be thawing. It lies behind Saigyo's seventh poem in Book One as well, and the act of taking water in the hands comes from it.

The first line means with the sleeve wet, taken unchanged from the model.
The verb in the second line means to take water up in the hands, also the model's word, and the same act appears in Jien's two hundred and fifty-eighth poem in Book Three.
The third line names the surface of the water so taken. The previous poem had a whole pond; here the water is no more than a handful.
The word in the fourth line means of heaven.
The poem closes on an exclamatory particle. That a whole sky should show in the water of two hands is the poem's point, a contrast of great and small. The model wrote of water freezing in spring; this one holds stars in water in autumn, and one action is used in another season.

Author

Fujiwara no Nagato

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other