Kokinshu #177

[lnhammer]

Written for another when, in the Kanpyô Era, the Emperor [Uda] commanded the courtiers to present poems on the night of the Seventh.

    Constantly searching
the white waves in the shallows
    of Heaven's River,
he didn't know how to cross
when daybreak had, yes, begun.

—11 November 2011

Original by Ki no Tomonori. On the one hand, this is about the Oxherd searching for a way across; on the other, it's also about the man Tomonori is pinch-hitting for, who he implies searched all night for something to write but also failed. This secondary meaning suggests reading this pronounless poem as in third person instead of first. In some Tanabata stories, the Oxherd cannot cross the Milky Way if the sky is overcast, and the whitecaps may represent such clouds. Pivot-word: shiranami is "white wave" but can also be read as "not knowing," which has less relevance to the Oxherd than the non-poet. The first half is grammatically compressed, with case-markers dropped left, right, and center, which means guessing at the exact grammatical relationships of the nouns, though their general roles are fairly clear.


ama (no) kawa
asase shiranami
tadoritsutsu
watari-hateneba
ake zo shinikeru

---L.