Kokinshu #407
Monday, 17 June 2013 06:57![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Sent to someone in the capital as he boarded the ship when he was banished to Oki Province.
Tell that one, at least,
you boats of the fishermen,
that I have set out
rowing through the Eighty Isles
across the watery plain.
wata no hara
yasoshima kakete
kogiidenu to
hito ni wa tsugeyo
ama no tsuribune
---L.
Tell that one, at least,
you boats of the fishermen,
that I have set out
rowing through the Eighty Isles
across the watery plain.
—21 April 2010, rev 3 June 2013
Original by Ono no Takamura. Previously posted as Hyakunin Isshu #11, though tweaked since. The occasion is his 834 exile for refusing to join an embassy to China (see #335) -- in effect, "I may not have gotten on that boat, but this one..." Who the boats are to tell is ambiguous and could be plural, but given the apparently contrastive wa, a single person seems likely. Eighty Islands is both a name for the Japanese archipelago and a generically large number (it could also be rendered as "endless isles"), and an ambiguous verb (kakete) makes it possible to endlessly debate whether he has set out towards them or they are set out upon on the sea. And speaking of that sea, wata (see #250) was in his time an already archaic/poetic word for it, thus my poeticized rendering. In contrast to the previous, this is a poem on leaving, rather than heading toward, the homeland -- further linked by of starting with the plain of the sea (wata no hara) instead of the plain of heaven (ama no hara).wata no hara
yasoshima kakete
kogiidenu to
hito ni wa tsugeyo
ama no tsuribune
---L.