Izuku ni ka koyoi no tsuki no kumorubeki Ogura no yama mo nao ya kauramu

English Translation

And where would it be
that tonight's moon could be dimmed
even Ogura
with its name of little dark
must have changed its nature now

Meaning

Where could tonight's moon be clouded? Even Ogura, whose name means the dim place, must be changing its name.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 405

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The second poem on the moon and the clouding of the heart. Where the previous poem clouded the moon inwardly, this one says there is nowhere for it to be clouded at all. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Oe no Chisato was an early Heian poet who left many poems written to lines of Chinese verse set as topics. In Book One he is the poet of the fifty-fifth poem. Chomei's three hundred and ninety-seventh poem takes one of Chisato's for its model.
The time is a night in autumn; the place is Ogura in Yamashiro Province, written of in the three hundred and forty-seventh poem.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

An interrogative particle in the first line governs the attributive form at the end of the third: where?
The second and third lines ask where tonight's moon could be clouded. The question is rhetorical: nowhere at all.
The place name in the fourth line sounds the word for dim, faintly dark, and the particle carries the sense of even that mountain.
The verb at the close means to change, with an interrogative particle and an auxiliary of present conjecture. Tonight's moon is so bright that even a mountain named for darkness must be changing its name. Reason is turned on the literal sense of a place name; and where the previous poem gave a clouded heart, this one gives a world with no cloud in it, so that the two make a pair.

Author

Oe no Chisato

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other