ながるともなにとか見えむ手に取りて
引きけむ人ぞ幣と知るらむ
引きけむ人ぞ幣と知るらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Nagaru tomo nani to ka miemu te ni torite hikikemu hito zo nusa to shiruramu
- English Translation
-
Though it goes floating
down, what would anyone take
it for? Only the
one who took it in her hand
and drew it knows it for a wand
- Meaning
- Though it goes floating down, what would anyone take it for? Only the one who took it in her hand and drew it knows it for a wand.
- Commentary
-
160 The Purification Wand
While Captain Ariwara — that is, Ariwara no Narihira — was visiting the same Handmaid of Somedono, she sent him "Akihagi o irodoru kaze no fukinureba hito no kokoro mo utagawarekeri", and he answered "Aki no no o irodoru kaze wa fukinu tomo kokoro wa kareji kusaba naraneba". Later, when he had stopped coming, a robe was sent from him with word that he had no one even to wash it for him and would be grateful for her help; so she said that this was surely his own doing, and sent "Ōnusa ni narinuru hito no kanashiki wa yoruse to mo naku shika zo nakunaru". His reply was "Nagaru tomo nani to ka miemu te ni torite hikikemu hito zo nusa to shiruramu". That is the whole of the section.
Captain Ariwara is Ariwara no Narihira, counted among the six poetic geniuses; his son Ariwara no Shigeharu appears in the hundred and forty-third and hundred and forty-fourth sections. The Handmaid of Somedono appears in the hundred and fifty-ninth. The great purification wand was a large staff of paper streamers, touched by many hands in the rite and then set adrift on a river.
The setting is the moment her poem reached him.
What prompted it is hers, "Ōnusa ni narinuru hito no kanashiki wa yoruse to mo naku shika zo nakunaru", likening him to a purification wand.
This reply closes the hundred and sixtieth section. The prose passes no judgement; the section consists of the four poems alone.
The opening grants that it goes floating, its grammar concessive; he takes over her image of a wand set adrift.
What follows asks what anyone would take it for: a thing seen floating by cannot be identified.
The one who took it in hand is whoever held the wand at the rite.
The closing supposes that only that person knows it for a wand, with an emphatic particle governing the verb. If she calls him a wand, then she is the one who handled him. Taking the other's figure and turning its direction is a pattern that recurs throughout the exchanges in this book.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- Though the wind that gives the autumn fields their colour blows, my heart will not wither, will not turn away not being a blade of grass
- The sorrow of one who has become a great wand of purification is that, with no shoal to come to rest at, so he goes weeping
- If there is love in you, then let us lie down in a house grown over with weeds — and for our bedding spread out our own sleeves, and sleep
- Ōhara — and the mountain of Oshio too surely today of all days must be remembering things from the age of the gods