[32] やまが (Yamaga)

 Poem Meaning and Background

Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash

やまがはに・かぜのかけたる・しがらみは

yama gawa ni・kaze no kaketaru・shigarami wa

ながれもあへぬ・もみぢなりけり

nagare mo aenu・momiji nari keri

〜春道列樹 (Harumichi no Tsuraki)

Translation

In a mountain stream

There is a wattled barrier

Built by the busy wind.

Yet it's only maple leaves,

Powerless to flow away.

Meaning

Here the poet is describing a stream, where fallen momiji leaves have been blown into the water and have gathered up, in some places blocking the flow of the stream completely. He compares this to a man-made dam (shigarami), but in this case it is the wind who has built these barriers in the stream. 

This particular poem seems to have been composed by the author while he was walking along a path which ran from Kyoto to Soufuku-ji(崇福寺), an old temple in Shiga（志賀）, south-west of Lake Biwa. Therefore, rather than a poem written based on a theme, this poem is considered more of an "improvisational" type, based on the author's impression of a scene that they are directly witnessing. 
(More Japanese info on the poem can be found here.)

The phrase nagare mo aenu means something like 流れようとしても流れない (nagareyou to shitemo nagarenai) which in English means that though the river is trying to flow, it cannot. Shigarami are man-made dams, generally small and made of wood or woven bamboo and built to control the flow of water or to raise the water level upstream.

Author

A depiction of the author and
his poem by the artist Agameishi

Harumichi no Tsuraki (birth date unknown ~ 920) was not well known prior to writing this poem, but became famous thanks to it. Little about his life is known except that he was a student of history in Japan's former Imperial university.