小山田の庵近く鳴く鹿の音に
驚かされて驚かすかな
驚かされて驚かすかな
- Roma-ji
-
Oyamada no io chikaku naku shika no ne ni odorokasarete odorokasu kana
- English Translation
-
Near my hut that stands
by the little mountain field
the stag cries and wakes
me with a start—so in turn
I start him and chase him off
- Meaning
- Startled awake by the cry of a stag calling near my hut by the mountain paddy, I in turn startle it away.
- Commentary
-
Book Five Autumn Poems II 448
Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Topic unknown."
This is the twelfth poem of the deer sequence. Woken by a deer crying near the hut by the mountain paddy, the speaker in turn startles the deer and drives it away. The headnote gives no topic, and the circumstances of composition are not recorded.
The author's lay name was Satō Norikiyo; a guardsman of the North Office under Retired Emperor Toba, he took vows at twenty-three and traveled the provinces composing poems. His personal collection is the Sankashū.
The scene is an autumn night, in a temporary hut built beside a mountain paddy to guard the rice from deer.
The direct occasion is not recorded.
In the first line, "o" is a prefix, and the phrase refers to a paddy in the hills.
In the second line, "io" is the temporary hut for guarding the field. A deer come to ravage the rice is crying right beside it.
In the third line, "ne" is the deer's cry.
The fourth line means "being woken from sleep" by the deer's cry, with "re" the continuative of the passive auxiliary "ru." It continues the waking at the deer's cry of 445 and 447.
The last line means startling the deer that came to ravage the field and driving it off. The same verb "odorokasu" is repeated in passive and active forms, trading on its senses of "to wake" and "to startle" in a witty exchange, and "kana" is exclamatory. It turns the melancholy of the earlier waking poems into humor for variety, and the hut by the mountain paddy bridges to the field-guarding poems that follow: the rice leaves of 449, the sleeves of the hut-keeper in 453, and the guarding of autumn fields in 454.
- Author
- Saigyō
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- All the night through long as the stag calls for his mate his cries echoing, over the bush-clover field the dewdrops come spilling down
- Since I woke from sleep a long while now has gone by— this long autumn night, has it at last turned to dawn? I hear the deer calling out
- Mountain village home: wakened by the wind that stirs through the rice-plant leaves, deep into the night I hear the voice of the calling deer
- Does sleeping alone weigh more lonely on the stag who lies down at dawn on the moor where the wind turns the kudzu leaves inside out?