あやなくも曇らぬ宵をいとふかな
しのぶの里の秋の夜の月
しのぶの里の秋の夜の月
- Roma-ji
-
Ayanaku mo kumoranu yoi o itou kana Shinobu no sato no aki no yo no tsuki
- English Translation
-
Against all reason
I find that I hate a night
with no cloud at all
in the village of Shinobu
the moon on an autumn night
- Meaning
- Against all sense I find myself hating a cloudless evening: the autumn moon over the village of Shinobu.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 385
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The tenth poem on the moon, on the unreasonable dislike of a clear evening. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Tachibana no Tamenaka (?-1085) was a poet of the late Heian period, known to have gone down to Mutsu as its governor.
The time is an autumn evening; the place is the village of Shinobu in Mutsu Province, in what is now Fukushima.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The adverb in the first line means without reason, making no sense, so that the poet concedes the unreasonableness before stating it.
The second line means an evening without cloud, that is, one in which the moon is plainly seen.
The verb in the third line means to find hateful, used in the hundred and twenty-fifth and fortieth poems of Book Two. Among poems praising the moon, this one wishes to avoid it, and stands apart for that.
The place name in the fourth line sounds the verb for keeping out of sight and also the verb for longing. A reading is open in which the clear night is unwelcome because the speaker has something to hide.
The poem closes on a noun, the ending of the three hundred and seventy-fifth poem as well, recurrent through this run on the moon.
- Author
- Tachibana no Tamenaka
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- In Yamato, through a break in the cloud above Takamado hill its light comes added to it the moon drawn like a half bow
- More than anyone I have gazed at it, and spent my whole heart on it though the moon will never tell one watcher from another
- When the wind comes up the beads are shed, and briefly in the dew beneath the bush clover it lodges the moon out on the wide moor
- Who is it tonight with the wind through the bamboo go through him, watching the moon above the summits of Yoshino, I wonder