Hyakunin Isshu #64
Sunday, 6 June 2010 08:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer At the break of day
the mist on Uji River
is getting patchy --
here and there, in the shallows,
poles of fishing weirs appear.
asaborake
uji no kawagiri
taedae ni
arawarewataru
seze no ajirogi
---L.
the mist on Uji River
is getting patchy --
here and there, in the shallows,
poles of fishing weirs appear.
—14 May 2010
Original by Fujiwara no Sadayori, son of Kintô (#55) and receiver of #60. The haiku-like character of this descriptive poem is often commented on. It's also grammatically compressed, with a couple particles dropped and at least one verb left understood -- two, the way I read it (naru for the mist, plus a final aru or copula). Seze means "shallows" or "rapids" but some texts have Zeze, the name of the place where Uji River flows out of Lake Biwa, northeast of Kyoto; I read it as "shallows" because near Uji Bridge, the more likely setting, the river is not very rapid. Also unclear is whether the auxiliary wataru indicates that the stakes "partially" or "wholly" appear. Original:asaborake
uji no kawagiri
taedae ni
arawarewataru
seze no ajirogi
---L.