ひぐらしの鳴く夕暮ぞ憂かりける
いつも尽きせぬ思ひなれども
いつも尽きせぬ思ひなれども
- Roma-ji
-
Higurashi no naku yūgure zo ukarikeru itsumo tsukisenu omoi naredomo
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- It is the evening when the cicadas cry that is hardest, though the brooding never ends at any hour.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 369
Headnote: topic unknown.
Another poem on the autumn evening. The brooding is constant, and this hour is the worst of it. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Fujiwara no Nagato was a mid-Heian poet; this is his second appearance in this book, after the three hundred and sixteenth poem.
The time is an autumn evening; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The cicada named here sings at morning and evening from late summer into autumn, as in the two hundred and sixty-eighth and sixty-ninth poems of Book Three.
The first line names the insect.
An emphatic particle in the second line governs the attributive form in the third, singling out the evening.
The adjective in the third line means painful, unwelcome, used in Egyo's hundred and seventeenth poem in Book Two.
The fourth line means never coming to an end: the constancy of the brooding is granted first.
The concessive particle at the close turns it: among all that brooding, this one hour is the sharpest. It is the shape of Yoshitsune's three hundred and fifty-seventh poem, in which the colour deepened beyond all that had been brooded on before. Both weigh a single evening against the sum of every other.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Nagato
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- When the autumn comes even the wind in the pines of the evergreen mountain goes into me so that the colour seems to change
- The autumn wind comes blowing from elsewhere across Otowa mountain and what grass or tree of them could keep its peace under it