Sato wa arete tsuki ya aranu to uramite mo tare asajifu ni koromo utsuran

English Translation

The village lies waste—
'Is this not the moon of old?'
even in reproach,
who is beating robes among
the rank-grown sedge of this place?

Meaning

The village has fallen to ruin, and even as one reproaches the moon—'Is it not the moon of old?'—who is it that beats robes amid the overgrown sedge?

Commentary

Book Five Autumn Poems II 478

Headnote: "At a poetry contest of the Poetry Office, on the topic 'beating robes beneath the moon.'"
This is the fourth poem of the fulling-block sequence. In a village fallen to ruin, the poet wonders who, even while reproaching the moon as not the moon of old, beats robes amid the overgrown sedge. According to the headnote, it was composed on the topic "beating robes beneath the moon" at a poetry contest of the Poetry Office.
The author was a son of Kujō Kanezane who rose to Regent and Chancellor and was called Go-Kyōgoku-dono. He wrote the kana preface of the Shinkokinshū.
The scene is a moonlit autumn night, in a desolate village overgrown with sedge grass.
The direct occasion was a poetry contest held at the Poetry Office, where the topic "beating robes beneath the moon" was set.
The second line takes as its source Ariwara no Narihira's poem in the fifth book of love poems of the Kokinshū, "Is not the moon the same, nor spring the spring of old? Only I remain as I was." In that poem, visiting the place where a former lover had lived, he laments that neither moon nor spring seems as it once was.

The first line, "sato wa arete," means "the village has fallen to ruin," hypermetric with six syllables.
The second line borrows Narihira's phrase: "Is it not the moon of old?"—a lament for the past in a ruined village.
In the third line, "te mo" is concessive: "even while reproaching so."
In the fourth line, "asajifu" is a place grown with sedge grass, showing the village's ruin. It takes up the sedge-grown garden of 474.
In the last line, "ran," the attributive of the conjectural "ramu," answers "tare," "who," in the fourth line. To someone reproaching the moon in a ruined village comes the sound of a fulling block from no one knows whom, and the poem guesses at the unseen beater. Building on Narihira's lament for a moon changed from the past, it adds that robe-beating continues even amid such grief, uniting the topic's "moon" and "beating robes." The next poem, 479, on the same topic, hears the sound as meant to keep one gazing at the moon, so the two treat one topic in different spirits.

Author

Fujiwara no Yoshitsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other