KKS 14
Text
[寛平御時后の宮の歌合の歌]
[A poem at the Empress' Poetry Competition in the Kampyō era]
大江千里
鶯の谷より出づる声なくは春くることを誰かしらまし
|
uguisu no |
The bush warbler |
Notes
- Who would possibly know
- The version of the poem in the poetry contest manuscripts and the Shinsen man'yōshū reads "Who would possibly tell us" (tare ka tsuge-mashi) instead. Kagawa(Seigi) had a long explanation that Katagiri supports -- the basic idea is that "tell us" was the original reading, but the compilers of the KKS changed it to "know" to fit better with poem 11 (which says that people seem to know it's spring without the warbler's cry).
Other sources:
Analysis
This poem continues the theme of the preceding ones -- we need the voice of the warbler to truly feel that it's spring (11), but the only flowers in the valley are the caps of the river waves (12). So let's send the scent of our plums to the valley warblers (13), because who can feel spring without their cry? (14). In the next two poems we will finally have the warblers crying out. Katagiri sees 12-14 almost like a small story in early spring.
One interpretive question is what the imagined situation of the poet is. Some commentators take the last line literally, that we have a mountain recluse who has no way of knowing if spring has come without hearing the warblers. Others take this as yet another poem about the conflict between the date on the calendar and the actual spring scenery.
This is another poem that Fujiwara no Toshiyori (Toshiyori zuinō) identified as having a "fault" (yamai 病), in this case, the 2nd vowel should not be the same as the 4th and 5th vowels. While this may seem rather picky, it was an important factor in poetry competitions of the later Heian period.
Finally, there is a decent amount of commentary on possible Chinese influences on the poem. This may have been influenced by Chisato's poetry collection, which is almost entirely made up of lines of Chinese poetry which Chisato "translates" into waka. This poem is not in the collection, but Chisato's strong connection to Chinese verse may have influenced a search for a Chinese precedent for this poem as well. While no commentator identifies a specific line that this poem was "translated" from, they do find some precedent for the idea of warblers emerging from the valley in spring.
Early commentaries cite a line from the [1]] as the source of this idea, which is picked up by later commentators. But as Katagiri points out, the Shījīng reference is not specific to warblers and the context has nothing to do with spring. He suggests Tang poetry as a more likely source for the image and gives several examples of Tang poems using the image of a warbler leaving the valley in spring.
