八百日行く浜の真砂を君が代の
数に取らなん沖つ島守
数に取らなん沖つ島守
- Roma-ji
-
Yaoka yuku hama no masago o kimi ga yo no kazu ni toranan okitsu shimamori
- English Translation
-
Eight hundred days' walk,
the fine sand along that beach,
for my lord's long reign
count it as the number of years,
O guardian of the offshore isle.
- Meaning
- The fine sand of a beach so long it takes eight hundred days to walk—count it, I pray, as the number of years of my lord's reign, O guardian of the offshore isle.
- Commentary
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Book Seven Felicitation Poems 745
Headnote: "When I composed a hundred-poem sequence."
This poem celebrates the reign through the fine sand of the beach. The speaker asks the guardian of the offshore isle to count the sand of a beach eight hundred days long as the years of the lord's reign. According to the headnote, it was composed for a hundred-poem sequence.
The author is Fujiwara no Sanesada, a son of Fujiwara no Kinyoshi. He rose to Minister of the Left and was called the Latter Tokudaiji Minister of the Left.
The scene is a celebratory landscape with no season specified, and the place is an endless stretch of beach.
The direct occasion is the composition of a hundred-poem sequence.
The source poem is by Lady Kasa in Book Four of the Man'yōshū: "Yaoka yuku hama no manago mo waga koi ni ani masaraji ka okitsu shimamori."
The first line, "yaoka yuku," means "eight hundred days to walk." Using the first line of the source poem unchanged, it conveys the boundless length of the beach.
The second line, "hama no masago o," means "the fine sand of the beach." Following 710 and 714 in this book, countless grains of sand are likened to the years of the lord's reign.
The third line, "kimi ga yo no," means "of my lord's reign." The sand compared in the source poem to the abundance of love is turned here into the years of the reign.
In the fourth line, "kazu ni toranan," "nan" expresses a wish directed at another: "may you take it as the count."
The last line, "okitsu shimamori," ends on a noun, placing the one addressed at the end: the guardian of an island in the offing. Using the last line of the source poem unchanged, it is an allusive variation that turns a love poem into a felicitation. Like "the Guardian of Uji Bridge" in 743 in this book, it takes the form of addressing a guardian.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Sanesada
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
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- Of the aged one, the Guardian of Uji Bridge, let me ask this now: how many ages has it been, the source of these flowing waters?
- At seventy full, like the beach pine of Mitsu, you have grown old, yet what remains to a thousand years stretches farther still ahead.
- Mount Kasuga stands to the south of the capital, and so it thinks, like its deer: that the wisteria of the north may meet with its springtime.
- Ever green and firm, Kibi's Middle Mountain stands, covered all alike— awaiting a thousand years, pines of such a deep, deep color.