Tabigoromo urakaze saete Kaminazuki shigururu kumo ni yuki zo furisou

English Translation

On this travel robe
the wind off the bay blows cold,
and in the tenth month
out of the showering clouds
the snow comes falling as well.

Meaning

The wind off the bay is cold on this travelling robe, and in the tenth month the snow comes down as well, out of the showering clouds.

Commentary

Section 13 The Exchange with Tameko and Tamekane

The Kamakura chapters of the Izayoi Nikki proceed by way of letters arriving from the capital. The daughter of the former Captain of the Right Watch is a woman who composes poetry, and her poems have been taken into the imperial anthologies more than once. Known as the Gon-Chunagon in the household of Omiya-in, she writes to ask how the journey went, perhaps because the two of them had been in the habit of discussing poetry together morning and evening, and a poem comes with the letter. Abutsu-ni answers it. Then the lady's brother, the young lord Tamekane, writes in the same way of his concern for her and sends a poem of his own, and she answers that too. Two poems sent from the capital and two replies stand here together.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, and is living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Gon-Chunagon is the daughter of Tamenori, whom the text calls the former Captain of the Right Watch; she serves in the household of Omiya-in and has poems in the imperial anthologies. Tamenori was a son of Tameie and a younger brother of Tameuji, and the elder half-brother of Tamesuke, so that the Gon-Chunagon and Tamekane are grandchildren of Abutsu-ni's late husband. Tamekane is the lady's brother, called so in the text. Omiya-in was the consort of the retired emperor Go-Saga. Of all her correspondents, the Gon-Chunagon is the one with whom Abutsu-ni exchanges the most poems in what follows.

Within the tenth month of Koan 2 (1279), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, a lodging at the foot of the hills near the shore where the prose says the wind is very rough.

It answers Tamekane's "Furusato wa shigure ni tachishi tabigoromo yuki ni ya itodo saemasaruramu," and the prose says only that it was the reply.

With this poem the exchange with the Gon-Chunagon and Tamekane ends, and the prose moves on to the exchange with the Mikushige-dono of Shikken-mon'in.

A conjecture put as a question is answered with fact. The first line moves the third line of the sent poem to the head of the reply, showing by that placement that this is its answer. In the second line the wind off the bay suits the lodging by the shore that the prose describes, and standing next to the word for robe it also lets the sound of a garment's lining be heard. The verb there takes up the sent poem's closing verb of cold: what was asked about in conjecture is stated flatly as present fact. The third line names the tenth month, showing how little time has passed since the sixteenth of that month when she left, so that naming the month conveys the shortness of the interval as well. The fourth line answers the sent poem's rain: it is still falling. The closing line binds an emphatic particle to the verb, so that the snow the sender had only guessed at is declared to be actually falling with the rain; the reply fills in, one by one, every term of the question. Some manuscripts give sky in place of clouds in the fourth line.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other