Round One

Left (T – Win)

絶えずたく室の八島の煙にも猶立ちまさる恋もするかな

taezu taku muro no yashima no keburi ni mo nao tachimasaru koi mo suru kana

Endlessly kindled, At Muro no Yashima The smoke Yet rising more Is my love for you!

Lady Settsu
49

Right (M – Win)

杯のしひてあひみむとおもへども恋しきことのさむるよもなき

sakazuki no shiite aimimu to omoedomo koishiki koto no samuru yo mo naki

Over a cup of wine To press you to meet I thought, yet My love for you Will never cool in this world!

Lord Akikuni

50

Toshiyori states: the first poem’s ‘endlessly kindled’ is an error. Fires are not actually kindled at Muro no Yashima—vapour rising from clear waters in the land appears to be smoke, so I wonder about the use of ‘kindled’ in this context. Nevertheless, if one was referring to real smoke, why wouldn’t you compose in this way? The tone of the poem isn’t bad. The second poem is an interesting display of technique, but it doesn’t appear that one would have to compose like this. Saying ‘cup’ leads to ‘wine’ and emphasises the drinking of it, but then if there were no wine and no drinking, how could one press someone to do something? In addition, I wonder whether it’s appropriate to begin with ‘cup’? This is an excess of technique over substance. The Left is more poetic, so I say it’s the winner.

Mototoshi states: what are we to make of ‘Endlessly kindled, / At Muro no Yashima / The smoke’? And what do the fires kindled at this location resemble? There are two senses of ‘Muro no Yashima’: one is a location in Shimotsuke; the second refers to people’s dwellings—we know from earlier treatises that forges are described as ‘Muro’. Which of these two senses is being used here? Whichever it is, ‘endlessly’ does not appear to have been previously associated with either of them. For example, there’s Koreshige’s poem:

風ふけば室のやしまの夕煙心のうちに立ちにけるかな

kaze fukeba muro no yashima no yūkeburi kokoro no uchi ni tachinikeru kana

When the wind blows Across Muro no Yashima At eventide as smoke, Within my heart, My passion soars…

It does not appear that the smoke rises endlessly here. Exemplars of endlessly rising smoke are the peak of Asama, or Mount Fuji, and these seem to have long been the subject of compositions. It seeming that this poem sought to express the essential meaning of ‘endlessly kindled’, such enquiries need to be made and, if I may be so bold, do not appear, do they? The Right’s poem has ‘Over a cup of wine / To press you to meet / I thought, yet’—while the conception of ‘press’ here sounds extremely unusual, what does it mean that ‘My love for you / Will never cool in this world’? It seems that ‘cool’ as a piece of diction is being used to make drunkenness a metaphor for being in love. If that’s the case, then, well, there are many foundational texts on this. So, even if one gets drunk, what then happens? Is there a world where this never ‘cools’? There was the case of man in Cathay who spent a thousand nights drunk, but that was only three years and not without end. In the sutras there is the drunkenness of ignorance and that might be a world in which one would not find sobriety, but there is no way to make this applicable in this poem. It is a little better than the Left poem’s endless kindling and extremely charming.