Kokinshu #175

(Topic unknown.)

    River of Heaven,
is it because you're spanned by
    a bridge of colored leaves
that the Weaver Maid awaits
the arrival of autumn?

—14 November 2011

(Original author unknown.) And from a heavenly perspective we swoop down to earth. This poem is especially admired for its romantic tone, and I'm not really satisfied with how well I've conveyed that. Ama no kawa ("River of Heaven," now without its banks) is another key 5-syllable phrase often appearing without a case-marker; for this one, the only way I can make grammatical sense of it is as address, as the second-person subject of the transitive verb watasu ("to span," with the leaves as explicit direct object), even though that treats the verb as passive and so may be way off base. My justification for the interpretive "the arrival of" is how emphatically the autumn being waited for is marked. Note this first mention of autumn leaves -- here written with kanji meaning "crimson leaf," but the term encompassed all the colors of the season.


ama (no) kawa
momiji o hashi ni
wataseba ya
tanabatatsume no
aki o shimo matsu

---L.