A Hundred Verses from Old Japan/Poem 3
3
KAKI-NO-MOTO NO HITOMARO
Ashibiki no
Yamadori no o no
Shidario no
Naga-nagashi yo wo
Hitori ka mo nemu.
THE NOBLEMAN KAKI-NO-MOTO
Long is the mountain pheasant’s tail
That curves down in its flight;
But longer still, it seems to me,
Left in my lonely plight,
Is this unending night.
The writer was a foundling, picked up and adopted by Abaye at the foot of a persimmon tree, which is in Japanese kaki, from which he got his name. He was an attendant on the Emperor Mommu, who reigned A.D. 697–707, and was one of the great poets of the early days of Japan; he is known as the rival of Akahito Yamabe (see next verse), and after death was deified as a God of Poetry. There is a temple erected in his honour at Ichi-no-Moto, and another at Akashi, not far from Kobe; he died in the year 737.
In the fourth line nagashi may be taken as the adjective ‘long’, or the verb ‘to drift along’; and yo may mean either ‘night’ or ‘life’; so that this line, which I have taken as ‘long, long is the night’, may also mean ‘my life is drifting, drifting along’. Yamadori (pheasant) is literally ‘mountain bird’, and ashibiki is a pillow-word for mountain, which is itself the first half of the word for pheasant.