Poetry Thursday - Japanese poems about fish

Bonito (katsuo) and saxifrage (yukinoshita [雪の下]) by Hiroshige (via)

Fresh bonito tastes best
when you let it melt in your mouth
under the snow of Kamakura
- Toshihiro Machikado

(The phrase “under the snow,” is the literal translation of the name of the plant below the fish, saxifrage.)


I found the translation of the poem that is written - or rather, carved and printed -on Hiroshige's print while researching Hiroshige's Shoal of Fishes, published in the1830s in response to a request from the Kyokashi poetry guild for prints to accompany ten poems. So really the poem is more important than the fish - or at least the poem preceded the fish.

The article from which this comes also gives the translation to another poem, by Haruzono Shizue, about trout - or rather, it gives three translations, some more "poetic" than the others.