Kakikurashi yuki furu sora no nagame ni mo hodo wa kumoi no aware o zo shiru

English Translation

It darkens over,
and gazing at this sky where
the snow is falling,
I too know the sorrow of
a whole heaven set between.

Meaning

The sky darkens over and the snow comes down; and gazing at it, I too know the sorrow of all that heaven set between us.

Commentary

Section 14 The Exchange with the Mikushige-dono of Shikken-mon'in

The lady known as the Mikushige-dono of Shikken-mon'in is a daughter of the Koga Chancellor Michiteru. She too has had many poems taken up, from the Shokusenzaishu onward and in the private collections of two or three houses, so that her name is well known. She now serves Anka-mon'in as one of her ladies. On the day before Abutsu-ni set out for the east, she went to the Kitashirakawa residence to take her leave, but the lady did not appear. From Kamakura she therefore writes: that the preparations of that one night were so hurried she could not even send word, and that even as she left in haste the lady was on her mind. Gathering together the forlornness of a year ending while she sleeps on the road, and the ceaselessness of the snow, she adds a poem. She had hoped for a reply by the first sure hand; and today, the twenty-second of the twelfth month, the letter comes, welcome and unlooked for. In it the lady says she would like to write of everything in detail, but that tonight she is caught up in an imperial progress made to avoid an unlucky direction and cannot say all she means, which she regrets; and that on the very day of the farewell visit she had gathered the younger women to go and see the autumn leaves at Minedono, so that she heard of it all only afterwards — why, she asks, was she not told? A poem comes with this. Then, guessing at what followed, that it was turning to snow, she adds another. Abutsu-ni this time answers only the poem about not being told the day of departure.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Mikushige-dono served Shikken-mon'in and was a daughter of the Koga Chancellor Michiteru, a poet with many pieces in the imperial anthologies from the Shokusenzaishu onward and in the private collections of several houses; she now serves Anka-mon'in. Both Shikken-mon'in and Anka-mon'in were daughters of the retired emperor Go-Takakura. Kitashirakawa was Anka-mon'in's residence, and Minedono was the mountain villa of Kujo Michiie. The four poems of this section turn on a leave-taking in the capital that never took place, and the exchange is built so as to reach back in time.

The twenty-second of the twelfth month of Koan 2 (1279), a poem in the letter received in Kamakura from the capital.

It is the lady's answer to "Kiekaeri nagamuru sora mo kakikurete hodo wa kumoi zo yuki ni nariyuku," guessing at what must have come after its last line, that the sky was turning to snow.

Abutsu-ni does not answer this one, and replies only to the other poem in the same letter.

The reply picks up the sent poem line by line and reassembles it; it is less an answer than a part-song. The first line takes the third line of the sent poem and turns it transitive: the sky darkening itself. The second line answers the sent poem's closing line, taking what was still turning into snow and receiving it as snow now falling. The third line answers the sent poem's second line, so that she too is gazing at the same sky. The fourth line sets down the sent poem's fourth line almost unchanged, matching the terms in which distance is measured. The closing line binds an emphatic particle to the verb: where the sent poem had ended with nothing but the change in the sky, this one adds that she knows that distance herself. Answering nearly every line and adding only one word of her own at the end, she consoles a poem about separation by saying that the separation is known on her side too.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other