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When I woke this morning, the world around me was laden in a light coating of snow (hence the pictures above). Snow doesn’t lay very often in Kyoto. How nice it would be I thought, if I could get in a taxi and take some pretty pictures of golden Kinkakuji all wrapped up in its snowy white coat. But instead I had to go to Katsura to discuss the evolution of the panda’s thumb (as it turns out it’s not even a real thumb, merely an extended radial sesamoid – pah!) and by the time I got back the snow had of course melted. Ho-hum… I’m going to give you a snowy poem today instead.
For, with the aid of a secret helper, I am going to begin adding some translations from the 百人一首 to the blog, along with some of the contextual information that is oddly missing from most available English editions of the collection. I am not setting out to translate all one hundred poems, (that would be mad), but am selecting poems appropriate to the current season. My translations are those of an amateur but I’m doing this in large part for my own pleasure and learning, and also hopefully, the added explication of each poem will help you to enjoy them too.
A quick note before we start today: if you don’t know, the 百人一首 (“hyaku nin isshu” or “One Hundred Poems By One Hundred Poets”) is a collection of classical Japanese poetry compiled by Fujiwara Teika in the 13th century. It is hugely influential and is also the basis for the traditional New Year’s card-game karuta, thus ensuring that even though many modern Japanese might not fully understand these poems, they are at least familiar with them. I’ve been ever so slightly obsessed with it for the last ten years.
Here’s today’s snowy poem in kanji and romaji (number 4 in the collection’s standard order):
田子の浦に
うち出でて見れば
白妙の
富士の高嶺に
雪は降りつつ
[山部赤人]
Tago no ura ni
Uchiidete mireba
Shirotae no
Fuji no takane ni
Yuki ha furitsutsu
[Yamabe no Akahito]
And here’s my translation:
Stepping out on Tago beach
Looking out to Fuji
There upon that high white peak
Snow-flakes softly flurry falling.
[Translation by Michael Lambe]
I can’t think of a better poem to start the year with, so evocative it is of one of Japan’s most famous wintry symbols; snow-capped Mount Fuji. As Tanabe Seiko says in her book on the collection, it puts you in mind of a scene on a hanging scroll in a typical Japanese tokonoma alcove. It’s a bit controversial though, because you see what we have in the Hyaku nin isshu is not Yamabe no Akahito’s original poem. What he wrote was this:
田子の浦ゆ
うち出でて見れば
真白にぞ
富士の高嶺に
雪は降りける
That’s the original version as contained in the earliest of all Japanese poetry collections: the Manyoushu. Our man Fujiwara Teika took his version from the later ShinKokinshu collection, and that version has obviously been meddled with. Many critics have complained about this, lamenting the loss of the original’s more straightforward “masculine” style for the rather flowery ornamentation of the latter. Decorative words like 「白妙」 and 「降りつつ」 they say, are sheer vandalism, ruining the poem and making it somehow effeminate. They change the meaning of the poem too, for in the original, the snow has fallen already 「降りける」 and what the poet is describing is merely the pristine white snow-cone that has piled up on Fuji and that he can see as he goes about his business on Tago beach. In the latter version, the word used is 「降りつつ」; the action is continuous and so the snow is still falling. On this point again, some rather literal minded critics have complained that it is simply impossible to see snow falling on Fuji from Tago beach. It’s too far away for heaven’s sake!
We need to get into the poetic mindset of the era of the Shinkokinshu however. For the poets of that age, without words like 『白妙』and 『雪は降りつつ』this poem would lack grace and sound awkward. It was important to conform to the aesthetic standards of the time and in light of this, changing the meaning a tad would have been considered pretty insignificant. Personally, I like the telescopic effect of the latter version; as it swoops in from the distant viewpoint of Tago, right up to the snow-flakes falling on the mountain-top. And I think a more feminine, or graceful style is better too. After all, we are talking about snow here. In my own translation I’ve tried to include the same gentility and sense of perpetual motion about the summit of the eternal mountain.
Here are some additional notes on the poet and the language:
Yamabe no Akahito was an 8th century poet, ranked among the greatest of the Manyoushu collection, and typically wrote pure and gentle, vivid poems contemplating nature. Though famous, his reputation was gained as a result of other more representative poems and today’s poem was largely ignored until Teika picked it for his collection.
Tago no ura refers to a wide strip of coastline stretching from Yuhimachi to Kabaharamachi in modern Shizuoka-ken.
うち出でて見れば means “going out to see something from a good viewpoint” (only much more concisely - Japanese is cool that way).
白妙の – originally used to refer to white clothing, it came to mean “pure white” or “snow white”. It is the “makura kotoba” or “pillow word” for snow and perhaps also for Fuji. A “makura kotoba” is a kind of fixed ornamental word used to set the tone for another specific word in classical poetry.
高嶺に = A lofty peak.
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