A waka about impermanence, the 933th of the Kokinshû, first poem of the Book 18 :
世の中は
何か常なる
飛鳥川
昨日の淵ぞ
今日は瀬になる
yo no naka wa
nani ka tsune naru
asukagawa
kinô no fuchi zo
kyô wa se ni naru
In this world,
is there anything eternal ?
The Asuka River
yesterday a deep water
is today a shallow stream.
常なる < 常なり : permanent, unchanging, eternal
飛鳥川 : Asuka river ; I’ve read that asu can be a way of saying 明日, tomorrow. This river can also be found in other poems of the anthology.
淵 : deep water, abyss, deep pool
瀬 : rapid, shallow, current
I think the difficulty of this waka resides in the two なる who can be confusing when we read them the first time. The first is apparently a “pseudo-adjective” (I have also seen them referred to as “adjectival verbs”), the classical equivalent of the modern -na and -to adjectives.
From what I’ve seen, there are 2 types of them, the -nari and -tari. Here we have a なり pseudo-adjective in its rentaikei form, なる. I’ve also read about a new grammar point, the kakarimusubi rule that applies here I believe ? I’ve read in the book of Hellen Craig McCullough that there are 5 particles concerned by this rule, and か and ぞ are two of them. They are both in medial position, so the final inflected form in the sentence is a rentaikei (here, the two なる) ?
It’s still confusing for me, but for the first I find it easier to understand if we get that なり is the contraction of に有り. It’s clearly not the same meaning that the second なる at the end where we know that, because of the に, に なる means “to become”. I had some hesitations for the translation of the last line, I was wondering if I should write “has became, today, a shallow stream” or “has became a shallow stream” but I didn’t want too many syllables while still including “today”. So I chose to write “is today a shallow stream”, it still suggests the idea of change. I hesitated also about the translation of the kanji, perhaps I should have written “has became a rapid” or something like that… but I think “shallow stream” is also a good way to describe it. The 4th line too can be written differently, but here I have seven syllables and I prefer “deep water” rather than “deep pool”.
Like always, please correct me if I made any mistakes, all of this is still very hard for me.
The river in general is often used to describe impermanence, just like in the beginning of the very sad and beautiful Hôjôki (方丈記). It’s a very striking, moving and obvious metaphor, like in the poem 836 where Mibu no Tadamine, saddened by the death of his sister, evokes the impossibility to keep someone alive just like we would create a dam to stop the water from going away. The 837th positions himself in the echoes of it while putting in emphasis the fact that water flows in only one direction, and that it’s impossible to make it come back.
A reminder that all the waka of this masterpiece were carefully arranged in a precise order to create bridges between them, just like the 71th in the Book 2 that answers directly the interrogation of the 70th.