The only book I've seen that discusses interpretation issues in depth is Mostow's Pictures of the Heart, though that only touches on some of what I've talked about in passing: for individual poems, he goes into how the editor of One Hundred People, One Poem Each understood it, in contrast to the earlier original audience and later interpreters. Fascinating stuff, really. More broadly, the aural quality of poems comes up repeatedly in McCullough's study of the Kokinshu, Brocade by Night, but she rarely touches on issues of interpretation or translation.

FWIW, my answer to the question is, if translating the poem on its own or as part of Kanesuke's collection, the second is correct, but if translating it as part of the Kokinshu, the first is.

---L.