This was something I read recently that I felt like posting:
| Japanese | Romanization | Translation |
| 田子の浦に | Tago no ura ni | As I set out on |
| うち出でて見れば | Uchi idete mireba | the beach of Tago, and look, |
| 白妙の | Shirotae no | I see the snow constantly falling |
| 富士の高嶺に | Fuji no takane ni | on the high peak of Fuji, |
| 雪は降りつつ | Yuki wa furitsutsu | white as mulberry cloth. |
This poem was composed by Yamabe no Akahito ( dates unknown ) who according to Mostow was a contemporary of Hitomaro (poem 3). He is also one of the Thirty Six Immortals of Poetry and was a leading poet during the reign of Emperor Shomu.
Mostow carefully explains that this poem, like many of the earlier poems in the Hyakunin Isshu were written in an old Japanese-Chinese hybrid script called manyōgana and was thus open to many interpretations. In fact, the poem has evolved over time and the version in the Hyakunin Isshu is only one such version.
This matters because there’s much debate about where Akahito actually was. The location of Tago no Ura is now Suruga Bay in Shizuoka Prefecture, but originally may have meant some place much closer to Mount Fuji, under it’s “shadow”, so to speak.
One other interesting note for readers of this blog is the middle line, shirotae no, which as you may recall from poem 2 is one of those special “pillow words” used in Japanese poetry. It is a very idiomatic term which conveys something that is gleaming white, or as Professor Mostow translates, white as mulberry cloth.
The Hyakunin Isshu 
Leave a Reply