Inishie wo

いにしえを/思えば夢か/うつつかも
　　　夜はしぐれの/雨を聴きつつ
(良寛 1758-1831)

inishie wo / omoeba yume ka / utsutsu kamo
　　　yoru ha shigure no / ame wo kikitsutsu
(Ryokan 1758-1831)

thinking of
the past - a dream?
reality?
　　　listening to the
　　　rain at night


This is a wonderful poem, and I'd suggest again that it's a poem of solitude, where the boundaries between dream and reality become haziest. 'Shigure' is strictly a shower in late autumn or early winter, though I haven't included that detail in my translation. I managed to find other translations on the net. The first has a different first line and is confusingly attributed to a much earlier poet, but this seems to be an error. There are also two (1 2) with no Japanese I found through creative googling (ryokan rain dream). The second is in the 'unsourced' section of the page. You'll come to your own conclusions, of course, but I feel there's too much added in these translations, especially the decisions on tense. To be specific all three have the narrator listening to the rain in the present.

However, there's an interesting comment on the poem I found on a Japanese site*. This comment seems to suggest, as far as I understand it, that the narrator may be remembering listening to the rain in the past, prompted not by present rain, but by the wind in the pine trees, or the flowing of the river, or the rustling of leaves. This interpretation maintains the ambiguity, so that we don't know whether the rain itself is past or present, dream or reality. Ryokan is quite an interesting character, and you can see his Wikipedia entry here.

* View - (character encoding: Japanese (Shift_JIS) and the opening is written 'いにしへを思へば' if you want to find it on the page)

Alternate searches:

'inishie o' 'yoru wa shigure no' 'ame o kikitsutsu'