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山部宿祢赤人詠故太上大臣藤原家之山池歌一首
Yamabe no sukune Akahito, one verse composed on the garden pond at the mansion of the late Fujiwara Chancellor (Fuhito)

昔者之 舊堤者 年深 池之瀲尓 水草生家里
いにしへの古き堤は年深み池の渚に水草生ひにけり
inisipe no/puruki tutumi pa/tosi pukami/ike no nagisa ni/mikusa opinikeri
The weathered bank of the past–since it has been a great many years, now on the shore of the pond water grasses flourish!
(MYS 3-378)

I seem to have moved into Volume 3, quite unplanned, but fitting perhaps since the rest of volume 2 is banka (elegiac verse) and doesn’t really seem to go with the theme of the blog. Although, in its own way, this verse too is an elegy.
Probably a little more than a decade after the death of Fujiwara no Fuhito, one of the most powerful politicians of the early Nara age, Yamabe no Akahito, one of MYS’ “greats,” stands on the banks of a garden pond within the grounds of his former mansion. We don’t know if his descendants are still living there (and let’s face it, they probably were), but that doesn’t matter - the pond has fundamentally changed since the days when its former master looked after it. Ooh, I’m getting close to a political reading here, and I think it’s certainly possible - but I don’t really want to go there. I think what’s more important here is the lament of the passage of time, and the seeming indifference of natures’ cycles to the impermanence of human experience.
The poem begins by emphasizing the temporal distance between Fuhito’s age and the poem’s present by repeating “inishie” and “furuki” - two words that evoke the past, but “furuki” also implying erosion, wearing down, “becoming old.” The bank is the bank of the past, but it is now weathered down, a shadow of its former self. The next line tells us why this is the case: many years have passed. We implicity understand that these are years since Fuhito’s passing. The pond is the pond of old, and yet years separate its past from its present. Its continued existence evokes the past, but can never recall it - a barrier of “water grasses” has arisen around its edges to convey just such a reality. Thus the irreversibility of time, the irrecoverability of the past, that all-too-familiar poetic topos, is what emerges here, but to striking effect, and with considerable poetic technique. The poem relies on linguistic linkages that add another level to it: inishie and furuki mean similar things, but their different nuances serve to set up the parallel between past and present in an efficient, succinct manner; ‘tsutsumi’ (bank) is juxtaposed with 'nagisa’ (shore) below, the former being what once was and is now eroded (furuki), the latter being the new site of growth for the water grasses, whose new life stands in sharp contrast with that which once was, but at the same time evokes the cyclicity of nature (the law of rise and fall); the third ku, “toshi fukami,” literally translates “as the years are deep,” with “deep” very smoothly transitioning into the first word of the fourth ku, “pond” - thus years and water are explicitly likened to one another - both creating distance, the former temporally and the latter spatially. Thus this poem is much more than Akahito simply lamenting that Fuhito’s household has been slacking off on their gardening maintenance since his death. It wouldn’t matter if the pond looked exactly the same - and it certainly wouldn’t be poetic if it did. What is interesting is the way the scene maps onto the pathos associated with the irrecoverability of the past, of which Fuhito was apart. That is what makes it the “right” image through which Akahito might convey such emotive content, because it conjures spatially the types of temporal barriers felt by those “left behind”, while the landscape itself is also not unaffected by time, and through the conflation of the water grasses and the “deep years,” acquires an affect of its own, one of longing for a past that will always remain irrecoverable.
Ah, there’s a reason Akahito is “one of the greats.” I have paired this poem with this photo of a garden pond taken on the grounds of a museum in Yǒngju, North Kyǒngsang province in South Korea. I thought it captured the scene of a carefully constructed and formerly well-manicured garden pond, that has now seen “water grasses” growing up on its shores. I think that those have nice orange flowers and so were probably planted there, and you can see the grasses on the far banks are still kept short, so it’s not quite the level of “sabi” that perhaps Akahito is evoking, but the algae and lotus on the surface of the water cause it to almost blend into the green landscape in a way that does suggest something of the atmosphere of Akahito’s verse. And in any case, I was going through these old photos and found I really enjoyed this one.