Miyamaji ya itsu yori aki no iro naramu mizarishi kumo no yūgure no sora

English Translation

On the mountain road
from what hour did the colours
turn to autumn's own
in the cloud I did not see
in the evening sky up there

Meaning

From what hour has the deep mountain road worn the colours of autumn? A cloud I had never seen, in an evening sky.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 360

Headnote: on the theme of travelling a mountain road in autumn, when the men wrote Chinese poems to be matched against Japanese ones.
The fourth poem on the autumn evening. The topic is a journey along a mountain road in autumn, set at a gathering where Chinese and Japanese verse were paired; the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth poems of Book One, the thirty-sixth of Book Two and the two hundred and sixty-first of Book Three come from such gatherings.
The poet, given as former Archbishop, is Jien; this is his second appearance in this book, after the three hundred and fifty-second poem.
The time is an autumn evening; the place is a road deep in the mountains.
The occasion was the set topic.

The first line, with an honorific prefix, names a road deep among the hills, closed by an exclamatory particle.
The second line asks from when. It puts the question of the moment of change, as Suemichi's two hundred and eighty-seventh poem did of a single night, here of a mountain road.
The auxiliary in the third line expresses present conjecture.
The fourth line means a cloud never seen before, with a past auxiliary in the attributive form. The sky is new to a traveller, and so there is no telling when it changed.
The poem closes on a noun. Where the other poems of this run end on the words for an autumn evening, this one ends on an evening sky, varying the form slightly within the sequence.

Author

Jien

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other