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Kokinshu #250
Wednesday, 30 May 2012 08:52 (from the same contest)
Although the colors
of both the trees and plants change,
for the flowers
of the ocean-crossing waves
there is indeed no autumn.
kusa mo ki mo
iro kawaredomo
watatsuumi no
nami no hana ni zo
aki nakarikeru
---L.
Although the colors
of both the trees and plants change,
for the flowers
of the ocean-crossing waves
there is indeed no autumn.
—11 May 2012
(Original by Fun'ya no Yasuhide.) While wata-tsu-umi, sometimes spelled watatsumi, is the name of a draconic sea god usually written with kanji meaning "ocean diety" (where wata is an archaic synonym for "sea"), here the word is essentially acting as a stock epithet for the waves with a sense of something like "sea-crossing" (where wata is the stem of wataru, "to cross over"); however, it's possible to hear an implicit contrast of the sea-god's domain with that of the Shinto goddess of autumn. Comparing whitecaps to flowers was a conventional image, one that Yasuhide has not made nearly as fresh as Komachi did, though otherwise it is again a competently constructed poem.kusa mo ki mo
iro kawaredomo
watatsuumi no
nami no hana ni zo
aki nakarikeru
---L.