Saewabinu yuki yori orosu Fujikawa no kawakaze kōru fuyu no koromode

English Translation

The cold has undone
me: down from the snow it comes,
the Fuji River,
and the wind along its bed
freezes the sleeves of my robe.

Meaning

I can bear the cold no longer: down from the snows the Fuji River comes, and the wind off it freezes the sleeves of my winter robe.

Commentary

Section 9 The Suruga Road: from the Oi River to the Shore of Tago

Out of Totomi the journey of the Izayoi Nikki enters Suruga, and this section runs from the twenty-fifth to the shore of Tago on the twenty-seventh. On the twenty-fifth she leaves Kikugawa and crosses the river called Oi. The water is very low, and contrary to what she had been told the crossing gives no trouble; the bed of the river is said to run some miles, and it is vast, so that one can imagine what it must look like in flood. Just as she is crossing Mount Utsu, a mountain ascetic known to the Ajari meets them on the road. It is as though the old story were being deliberately acted over again, and she finds it strange and delightful and moving and graceful all at once. Since they are travelling in haste she cannot write many letters, and sends word to one exalted household only. That night she stops at a place called Tegoshi. On the twenty-sixth she crosses a river called Warashina and comes out on the beach at Okitsu. At the house where she rests at midday there is a rough boxwood pillow; feeling wretched she lies down, and seeing an inkstone there she writes on the paper screen by the pillow without getting up. Toward dusk she passes the barrier of Kiyomi, where the waves breaking over the rocks look like white robes thrown on, which is very fine. Night falls soon, and she stops in a village near the sea, where the wind is wild all night and the waves seem to rise over the very pillow. Looking at Mount Fuji she finds no smoke rising; when she asks in what year it stopped, no one can even answer clearly, and the words of the Kokinshu preface come back to her. That night she lodges at a place called Nami-no-ue, and the roaring keeps her from closing her eyes. On the twenty-seventh, after full daylight, she crosses the Fuji River; the morning water is bitterly cold, and by her count she forded fifteen channels. The day then turns bright and mild and she comes out on the shore of Tago, where the sight of the fisherfolk at work moves her to speak.

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 her attendants; at Mount Utsu they meet an ascetic known to the Ajari, and by him she sends a letter back to the capital. All eleven poems of this section are her own, with no one to answer them. In the passage on the smoke of Fuji it is recorded that long ago her father had taken her as far as the province of Totomi, in the days when she composed the poem she quotes by its opening words.

The morning of the twenty-seventh of the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), fording the Fuji River in Suruga.

She crossed after full daylight; the morning water was bitterly cold, and by her count she forded fifteen channels. The poem belongs to that crossing.

There is no reply. The prose goes on to say that the day then turned bright and mild and she came out on the shore of Tago, so that a freezing morning gives way at once to a gentle noon.

Unusually for this section, the poem takes cold itself for its subject and stays with the thing. The first line joins a verb meaning to be chilled through to one meaning to find something unbearable, with a perfective, and opens by stating flatly that she is frozen past enduring. The second line, blowing down from the snow, gives the height the wind comes from. The third line sets the mountain she had been gazing up at the day before at her own feet, now as water and wind. In the fourth line the verb means to freeze, and to say that the wind freezes makes the cold a property of the air itself. The closing line ends on the noun for the sleeve of a robe, gathering the cold into that single frozen point. In the travel poems so far the sleeve has been the thing wet with tears; here it is the thing frozen by a river wind, and the same sleeve takes on another office. The prose insistence on counting fifteen channels bears out how long the cold went on.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other