saoshika no sora ni aware to kikoyuru wa yama no takane ni nakeba narikeri
A stag belling To the skies, sadly I hear— Perhaps, because ‘tis on the mountain’s peak He cries so…
Lord Masahira
45
Right (Win)
ゆふまぐれ霧のまがきのさびしさにをしか鳴くなり秋の山里
yūmagure kiri no magaki no sabishisa ni oshika nakunari aki no yamazato
Tangled in twilight With mist around my brushwood fence, Loneliness fills me, as A stag bells, by A mountain retreat in autumn
Shinkaku 46
What on earth is the conception of ‘sadly hearing something in the skies’? While no one can truly know why a stag bells, what is the point of saying that ‘sadness is in the skies’? And if one does hear it, it isn’t the case that anyone really knows that the stag is belling out of longing for his mate, is it. The stag seeming to bell by a brushwood fence in the mist, seems to sound a bit more moving at the moment.
kusagakure mienu oshika mo tsuma kouru koe oba e koso shinobazarikere
Hidden by the grasses, Unseen, the stag, too Longing for his mate, His bell, indeed, is unable To conceal!
Lord Yorimasa 37
Right
秋の野の花のたもとに置く露や妻よぶしかの涙なるらむ
aki no no no hana no tamoto ni oku tsuyu ya tsuma yobu shika no namida naruramu
In the autumn meadows, Upon the blossoms’ sleeves Are the fallen dewdrops The stag—calling for his mate— Letting tears fall?
Narinaka 38
The Left is novel, and the Right charming, respectively. The Right’s poem does have a large number of identical syllables—while this is criticized in the Code of the Creation of Poetry as a ‘whole body fault’, it is not the case that poems containing this defect have not appeared in poetry matches from time to time, and I don’t feel it’s necessary to examine whether there are a large number of similar cases here: such things are simply a style of poetry.
