All of these featured poems are taken from Fujiwara Teika’s ”Superior Poems of Our Time”, translated by Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, a thirteenth century collection of Japanese poetry. The work consists of a short critical essay by Teika and a carefully arranged sequence of eighty-three poems by other hands. His essay discusses the state of poetry in the early thirteenth century and offers advice and standards for aspiring poets; the sequence of poems teaches the same standards by example.

Despite the title, the poems are taken from the full range of Japanese poetry to Teika’s time, with emphasis on the preceding three centuries. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the sequence is its unique construction. As the translators demonstrate in their introduction and commentary, the poems are linked by subtle techniques of association and progression into a unified whole that can be read as a single long poem of more than 400 lines.

books.google.com/books/FujiwaraTeika

Fujiwara Teika is featured in Sanbusaku 1 三部作

If you fail to come,
Must I lie alone and bear the sound
Of the bamboo grass
Sighing deep within the mountains
As it rustles in the frosty night?

Since first they first flowered,
The mountain cherries have seemed to be
The white cascades
Of a celestial waterfall that streams
From the distant cloudland of the sky.

Here it is, yes here,
Where these set forth and those return
And others come to part-
Both friends and strangers meet together
At the Barrier Post of Meeting!

Worn out with living,
I had thought this mountain village
To be a safe retreat-
But it casts too searching a radiance
In a cloudless sky, this midnight moon.

O winds of heaven
Blow a barrier of clouds across the path
By which they came,
That for a moment I may keep in view
The forms of the Maidens of the Sky!

Remember well!
Whose promises of love were they
That bring my end?-
Mere clouds of yesterday blown away
At the first cold breath of the mountain wind.

My love for you
Is as unvarying in its color
As the needles of the pines
Waiting on the hillslopes of the the moon
To come and bring the splendor of the night.