おぼつかな秋はいかなる故のあれば
すずろに物の悲しかるらん
すずろに物の悲しかるらん
- Roma-ji
-
Obotsukana aki wa ikanaru yue no areba suzuro ni mono no kanashikaru ramu
- English Translation
-
It is past my grasp
what reason there is in fall
that everything should
become, without cause or point
a thing to be grieved over
- Meaning
- I cannot make it out: what reason has autumn, that everything should turn sad for no cause at all?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 367
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, an autumn poem.
The poem stands at the close of the run on the autumn evening, putting the question of why autumn should be sad. The original gives no fresh headnote.
This is Saigyo's fourth appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninety-ninth, three hundredth and three hundred and sixty-second poems.
The time is autumn; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first line means indistinct, hard to make out, the word used in Narinaka's hundred and fifteenth poem in Book Two.
The second line asks what kind of reason autumn has.
The third line means: because there is such a reason.
The word in the fourth line means for no cause, without occasion. It is the idea of Sanesada's three hundred and fourth poem and Kunaikyo's three hundred and sixty-fifth, and the causeless grief that has run through this book is here gathered into a question.
The auxiliary at the close expresses present conjecture and completes the question. In the two hundred and ninety-ninth poem the same poet described what the autumn wind does; this one asks why it does it, moving from description to enquiry. No answer is given, and the question is left standing.
- Author
- The Monk Saigyo
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- There is nothing I can point to and say, that is the thing that troubles and yet I put to my heart the question of autumn's dusk
- There is not a sleeve the autumn wind has not reached and does not reach too it is only from ourselves this dew, this evening of ours
- The same, and yet not what it was in the old days this autumn wind, and I gaze the more, and the more as a spindle turns its thread
- The evening in which the cicadas cry is hard to bear, though the thoughts I have are the ones that come always, and are never done