山里のかひこそなけれほととぎす
都の人もかくや待つらむ
都の人もかくや待つらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Yamazato no kai koso nakere hototogisu miyako no hito mo kaku ya matsuramu
- English Translation
-
In this mountain glen
there seems no point in dwelling—
for the cuckoo, then,
do the people of the capital
wait just as I wait here?
- Meaning
- There is no use, it seems, in living in this mountain glen; do the people in the capital wait for the cuckoo just as I am waiting here?
- Commentary
-
Book Two Summer Poems 58
The cuckoo comes down from the mountains to the villages, so one living in the hills should hear its first song before anyone in the capital. Yet the poet must wait just as city dwellers do, and laments that there is no point in his mountain home.
Where the preceding poem, 57, wishes to have the first song to himself, this one laments that even the advantage of a mountain dwelling is of no use. In both, the first song has not yet come, and the poems of waiting continue.
First line, "mountain village," refers to a dwelling in the hills far from the capital.
Second line plays on kai, meaning both a mountain "glen" and "worth" or "use." Koso and the realis nakere form a concord, and the poem pauses here.
Third line, "the cuckoo," is the object of waiting in the lines that follow.
Fourth line sets the people of the capital against the poet in the hills.
Fifth line uses ya for a question and ramu for present conjecture, imagining the people in the distant capital.
- Author
- Dōmyō
- Source
- Shika Wakashu
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Kotoshi dani matsu hatsukoe o hototogisu yo ni wa furusade ware ni kikaseyo
- Next Poem
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Yamabiko no kotauru yama no hototogisu hitokoe nakeba futakoe zo kiku