Kokoro naki mi ni mo aware wa shirarekeri shigi tatsu sawa no aki no yūgure

English Translation

Even to a heart
that has renounced, the sadness
makes itself known here
a snipe rising from a marsh
and an evening of autumn

Meaning

Even to one who has put such things aside, the pity of it makes itself felt: a snipe rising from the marsh, an evening in autumn.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 362

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The sixth poem on the autumn evening, and the second of the three evening poems. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The Monk Saigyo, whose lay name was Sato no Norikiyo, served Retired Emperor Toba as a guard of the northern quarters and took orders at twenty-three. He appears in Book One from the seventh poem, in Book Two at the hundred and twenty-sixth, in Book Three from the two hundred and seventeenth, and in this book at the two hundred and ninety-ninth and three hundredth.
The time is an autumn evening; the place is a marsh where snipe are found, a bird of the waterside common in autumn.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The poem is among the best known of all Saigyo's.

The first line means having no heart for such feeling: a man who has renounced the world. It is the stance of the same poet's two hundred and ninety-ninth poem, on one who never broods; there the example was another person, and here it is himself.
The particle in the second line carries the sense of even to such a one. The word after it means a deep, moved feeling.
The auxiliary in the third line is spontaneous in force: it makes itself known of itself. The heart moves without being willed.
The fourth line gives a snipe rising from a marsh, so that the beat of its wings and the silence left after it come to mind together. Where the previous poem gave a mountain without colour, this one gives a sound and the stillness that follows it.
The poem closes on a noun. Of the three, this alone has something moving in the scene.

Author

The Monk Saigyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other