Ogura Hyakunin Isshu 16

Ariwara no Yukihira a.k.a. Middle Counselor Yukihira (818–6.9.893)

Parting, separating
to Mount Inaba’s
peak where pines grow.
On hearing “pines!”
I shall return at once.

/1
Ariwara no Yukihira a.k.a. Chūnagon Yukihira

Tachi wakare
Inaba no yama no
Mine ni ouru
Matsu to shi kikaba
Ima kaeri kon

在原行平 (中納言行平)

立ち別れ
いなばの山の
峰に生ふる
まつとしきかば
今かへりこむ

/2
16

Fúaimm na gaíthe frisin lemán
ardon·peitte,
golgaire ind luin léith co n-aitte
íar mbéimm eitte.

“The sound of the wind against the elm-tree
that makes music for us,
the lament of the grey blackbird with delight
after it has beaten its wings.”

/3
Stanza 7 of Robad mellach, a meic mo Dé

MS: Bibliothèque Royale Bruxelles MS 5100‒4, p. 41
Image: @kbrbe https://uurl.kbr.be/1762597 

The full text: https://celt.ucc.ie/published/G400030/

The poet, member of the extended imperial family, wrote this poem probably when he was dispatched...
/4
...as governor to distant Inaba province and had to leave his lover behind in the capital. In later myth-making, the circumstances turned into an exile. There is no overt pronominal subject in the Japanese poem, but this time I could not avoid using one in the translation.
/5
The music of the woodland (céol caille) is a common theme in medieval Irish poetry too. In the example picked here, written around the year 1000, it is one of the memories that calls the poet, pretendedly saint Colum Cille, back to his native Ireland. No wood print by...
/6
...Hokusai is known for poem 16 of Hyakunin Isshu, but in 北斎漫画 “Hokusai Manga”, his 15-volume book of sketches published 1814‒1878, he has a monochrome depiction of the brooding poet beneath the pines. From his poem, and the circumstances hat surrounded it, an extended...
/7
...narrative developed, which, via the Genji Monogatari, culminated in the 15th-century nō-drama Matsukaze “Wind in the Pines” https://www.the-noh.com/en/plays/data/program_043.html (set in Suma bay). Like the original poem, the drama draws some of its effects from the the homonymy of matsu which means...
/8
...both “pine(-tree)” and “to wait, to pine”. Another untranslatable wordplay of the poem is the name of Mt. Inaba that can also be understood as “if (I) depart”. This is a wood print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839‒1892), the last great master of ukiyo-e. It illustrates...
/9
...a scene from the nō-play, the reminisced encounter between Ariwara no Yukihira & the sisters Matsukaze “Wind in the Pines” & Murasame “Autumn Rain” underneath a pine-tree. Western influence is much more directly discernible in this wood print than it is in Hokusai’s.
/10
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