Kokinshu #251
Friday, 1 June 2012 07:00![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Written when there was an autumn poetry contest.
On Evergreen Hill,
where the leaves are not changing
into bright colors,
do they keep hearing autumn
in the sound of blowing winds?
momiji senu
tokiwa no yama wa
fuku kaze no
oto ni ya aki o
kikiwataruramu
---L.
On Evergreen Hill,
where the leaves are not changing
into bright colors,
do they keep hearing autumn
in the sound of blowing winds?
—30 May 2012
Original by Ki no Yoshimochi. Based on his appearences in court records starting in 896, Yoshimochi was probably born around 880 or shortly before, had a career as a middling courtier, and died in 919. In addition to this one poem in the Kokinshu, he also wrote the Chinese-language preface (Tsurayuki wrote the Japanese one). ¶ The contest is otherwise unrecorded. Evergreen Hill is Tokiwa, for which see #148; its name is a homophone of tokiwa meaning "eternal" or "evergreen," from whence the conceit that autumn leaves don't change there. The pronoun issue is more tricky than usual here, as neither who hears the wind nor the speaker's location are explicit. I went with the speaker talking about listeners over yonder because that seems the easiest reading of the verb's speculative inflection, but he could well be on Tokiwa speculating about whether it's in the wind that autumn is heard. OTOH, there's no justification for my padding things out with "into bright."momiji senu
tokiwa no yama wa
fuku kaze no
oto ni ya aki o
kikiwataruramu
---L.