Kokinshu #248

When the Ninna Emperor was [still] a prince, while on his way to view Furu Waterfall, he stayed overnight at the house of Henjô's mother where the garden had been made to resemble autumn fields. While they were talking, Henjô composed and presented [this poem].

    Perhaps it's because
the household has decayed and
    the owner grown old,
that both garden and its wall
are like the fields of autumn.

—9 May 2012

Original by Henjô. The Ninna Emperor was Kôkô (see #21) and Furu Waterfall, now called Momoono Falls, is on the Yamato River near Nara (close to Isonokami). Henjô is taking polite self-depreciation of one's hospitality to humbler levels than usual because of the prince's imperial rank. Grammatical uncertainty: the final verb can be read as "is" or "become" -- I incline to the former because the latter's present tense reads oddly against the perfective growing old, but it requires interpolating "like" to sound natural in English. What doesn't come through in translation: these are, for once, agricultural fields.

And that wraps it up for book 4, the first half of autumn. Book 5 is, I gather, a little more obsessive focused on the leaves, ending in bare branches.


sato wa arete
hito wa furinishi
yado nare ya
niwa mo magaki mo
aki no nora naru

---L.