Oritachite

おり立ちて/今朝の寒さを/驚きぬ
　　露しとしとと/柿の落葉深く
(伊藤左千夫 1864-1913)

oritachite / kesa no samusa wo / odorokinu
　　tsuyu shito shito to / kaki no ochiba fukaku
(Ito Sachio 1864-1913)

going down,
amazed by
the morning's cold...
　　the dew and deeply piled
　　persimmon leaves


As with an earlier haiku I looked at the 'nu' of 'odorokinu' isn't negative, though here with 'odorokinu' rather than 'odorokanu' it's a bit clearer. I like the way this comes between the section about the cold, and the added details of dew and leaves in the Japanese original, but English word order means this disappears in translation. When I was wondering how to translate 'shito shito', which usually means 'gentle' as in 'gentle rain', I was happy to see that the final line needed a lot of words in English, and so I missed out the gentleness of the dew altogether. The last section in Japanese is actually longer than normal, this poem being (5-7-5-7-9) rather than (5-7-5-7-7). A Japanese middle school test (with answers) notes that this kind of poem is said to be '字余り' (jiamari), if you were wondering.

The test also says that the tanka is '三句切れ' (sankugire), or in other words that the pause would naturally come after the third section 'odorokinu'. I'm pretty sure this is where it would traditionally always come, and the previous Ryokan tanka are the same, though in the other Ito tanka I looked at the pause comes after the second section. Judging by Google, this tanka comes up a lot on tests, as there was another test in the top 10 results for my search. I'm not that impressed with this second test, which is multiple choice, matching tanka with their meanings. Is it a) a work where the solitary narrator's heartbreak is revealed in scenery depicted like a painting b) a work where...? Interpretation and multiple choice don't go well together.

Alternate searches:

'kesa no samusa o' 'tsuyu shitoshito to'