Katabuchi no fukaki kokoro wa arinagara hitome zutsumi ni sazo sekaruramu

English Translation

One bank has its deep
pool, and deep the heart may be—
yet for all of that,
the embankment of men's eyes
must be damming it, I know.

Meaning

The pool runs deep on one side, and the heart may run as deep; yet the embankment of watching eyes must surely be holding it back.

Commentary

Section 5 The Mino Road: from the Fujikawa to the Sunomata River

The journey of the Izayoi Nikki leaves the Omi road and enters the province of Mino. On the eighteenth, crossing the Fujikawa by the barrier, Abutsu-ni first turns a poem over in her mind. The plank eaves of the barrier hut at Fuwa were still as they had always been. From the barrier onward the sky darkened and rain came down, more than a passing winter shower, falling the whole day, until the road grew so bad that against her intention she stopped at the post station called Kasanui before the light had gone. On the nineteenth she set out again. Because of the rain that had fallen all night, the road around a place called Hirano was so wretched that no one could pass along it, and they went straight across the surface of the paddy fields instead. As the day broke the rain stopped. Around noon a conspicuous shrine stood on the road she was passing, and when she asked, she was told that it was known as the god of binding; and to that god she addressed a poem. At the river called Sunomata there was a floating bridge of boats set side by side and held fast, perhaps by ropes of vine. It was frightening, but she crossed. Since the river was very deep on the embankment side and shallow on the other, she turned two more poems over in her mind there.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, on her way from the capital to Kamakura to press her suit over the inheritance of the Hosokawa estate in Harima. With her went the Ajari no Kimi, the mountain ascetic who served as guide and who appeared in the section of parting poems, and her attendants. All six poems of this section are her own, and there is no one to answer them; but the first of them is spoken out of thought for the children left in the capital, the Jiju Tamesuke and the Taifu Tamemori.

The nineteenth of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), crossing the river called Sunomata in Mino on a floating bridge of moored boats.

The river was very deep along the embankment and shallow on the other side, and this is one of the two poems she turned over on seeing it.

There is no reply. The prose gives the second poem immediately after, closes the pair with a phrase meaning, so she turned it over in her mind, and with that the Mino road ends and the Owari road of the twentieth begins.

The poem reads the shape of the river in front of her straight over into the shape of a heart. The first line names a pool deep on one side only, taking up the prose remark that the river ran deep by the embankment and shallow opposite. The second line carries the depth of the water over into depth of feeling, and the adjective belongs by association with the pool, so that scene and heart are spliced in a single word. The third line is concessive: for all that such feeling exists. In the fourth line the word for embankment is a pivot, holding also the sense of wrapping something out of sight of watching eyes, and pool, embankment and damming run together as words of water. The verb that closes the poem means to hold water back, in the passive, with a present conjecture answering the adverb earlier in the line: surely it must be so. Whose deep heart this is the text never says, and it stands open: it may be the heart of someone left in the capital, or her own, unable to speak.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other