Poem Meaning and Background
わがいほは・みやこのたつみ・しかぞすむwaga io wa / miyako no tatsumi / shika zo sumu
よをうぢやまと・ひとはいふなりyo o Uji-yama to・hito wa iu nari
~喜撰法師 (Kisen Hōshi)
わがいほは・みやこのたつみ・しかぞすむ
waga io wa / miyako no tatsumi / shika zo sumu
よをうぢやまと・ひとはいふなり
yo o Uji-yama to・hito wa iu nari
~喜撰法師 (Kisen Hōshi)
Translation
My lowly hut isSoutheast from the Capital.
Thus I choose to live
And the world in which I live
Men have named "Mount of Gloom"
Meaning
I think this translation misses some aspects of the original poem, so here's a second translation:
My little hermitage, southeast of the capital/ is such a lonely place that I'm visited by deer/ The quietude is just the way I like it/ But people seem to think I've taken refuge in Uji/ because I've grown tired of the world.
In this second translation, you can see a little more clearly the difference in how the writer views his living circumstances compared to how others think of the way he lives. In the first half, we get a quaint, isolated but calm, view of his home; removed from the capitol, and a place where only deer come to visit him. In the second half, we hear how people judge his way of living, saying it must be gloomy, or that the author must have chosen to live there because he no longer wants to interact with the world. In Japanese, Uji-yama is a play on words, since the 宇治(Uji) is the actual name of the mountain, but 憂し（ushi) means unhappy or melancholy. The poem also pretty clearly implies that the writer feels differently from the people who are talking about him because it says 人は言う, which essentially means "People say that... (but I don't think of it that way)"
My lowly hut is
Southeast from the Capital.Thus I choose to live
And the world in which I live
Men have named "Mount of Gloom"
Meaning
I think this translation misses some aspects of the original poem, so here's a second translation:
My little hermitage, southeast of the capital/ is such a lonely place that I'm visited by deer/ The quietude is just the way I like it/ But people seem to think I've taken refuge in Uji/ because I've grown tired of the world.
In this second translation, you can see a little more clearly the difference in how the writer views his living circumstances compared to how others think of the way he lives. In the first half, we get a quaint, isolated but calm, view of his home; removed from the capitol, and a place where only deer come to visit him. In the second half, we hear how people judge his way of living, saying it must be gloomy, or that the author must have chosen to live there because he no longer wants to interact with the world.
My little hermitage, southeast of the capital/ is such a lonely place that I'm visited by deer/ The quietude is just the way I like it/ But people seem to think I've taken refuge in Uji/ because I've grown tired of the world.
In this second translation, you can see a little more clearly the difference in how the writer views his living circumstances compared to how others think of the way he lives. In the first half, we get a quaint, isolated but calm, view of his home; removed from the capitol, and a place where only deer come to visit him. In the second half, we hear how people judge his way of living, saying it must be gloomy, or that the author must have chosen to live there because he no longer wants to interact with the world.
In Japanese, Uji-yama is a play on words, since the 宇治(Uji) is the actual name of the mountain, but 憂し（ushi) means unhappy or melancholy. The poem also pretty clearly implies that the writer feels differently from the people who are talking about him because it says 人は言う, which essentially means "People say that... (but I don't think of it that way)"
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