Left (Win).
吉野山篠の假寢に霜冴えて松風早し深ぬ此夜は
| yoshinoyama suzu no karine ni shimo saete matsukaze hayashi fukenu kono yo wa |
Upon Mt Yoshino, In fitful sleep upon a bed of bamboo, The frost falls chill, indeed, and The wind gusts through the pines, With the fall of night. |
559
Right.
外山なる柴の編戸は風過て霰横ぎる松の音かな
| toyamanaru shiba no amido wa kaze sugite arare yokogiru matsu no oto kana |
On the mountains’ edge My woven brushwood door Is pierced by the wind; Hearing hail blown horizontal Against the pines… |
560
Both Left and Right are exaggerated in their insistence that the other’s poem lacks any faults.
Shunzei’s judgement: The Left’s ‘Upon Mt Yoshino, in fitful sleep upon a bed of bamboo’ (yoshinoyama suzu no karine ni) would seem to suggest an ascetic who, having travelled into the mountains, has made himself a hut from bamboo and pillowed upon the tree roots, would it not? But here he seems to have simply cut them down, spread them out and lain upon them! In addition, ‘The wind gusts through the pines’ (matsukaze hayashi) fails to sound elegant [yū ni shi kikoezaru]. The Right, by starting with ‘On the mountains’ edge’ (toyamanaru), suggests that the poet is speaking of his own dwelling’s door in the mountains. ‘Hearing hail blown horizontal against the pines’ (arare yokogiru matsu no oto) also just does not sound appropriate. Both poems have an exaggerated feeling [kotogotoshikaran to wa kokorozashite], and I cannot grasp who they are referring to. However, the Left’s poem is, still, somewhat superior.