Nerareji na miyako no tsuki o mi ni soete narenu makura no nami no yoruyoru

English Translation

You will not sleep, no—
with the moon of the city
held close to your side,
on that pillow, still unknown,
through these nights of coming waves.

Meaning

You will not sleep, I think: the moon of the capital kept close beside you, and that pillow still strange to you, through these nights of waves coming in.

Commentary

Section 16 Spring Comes: The Exchange on the Moon of the Capital

Before long the year ended and spring came. The view was clouded over with haze and hard to make out; the door of the valley was next door, and yet not even the first note of the warbler came to visit her. The spring sky she had known so long was hard to bear, and just when she was most homesick for the past, someone came to say there was a courier for the capital again. Among the letters she wrote to her usual correspondents, she sent a poem to the lady who had written to her of the lingering moon, and added other unremarkable things besides. The reply came by way of a sure hand, before very long, and she received it as one who had been waiting for it. The section consists of that exchange of two poems.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. Her correspondent is the exalted lady who, soon after her arrival in Kamakura, had answered the letter sent by the ascetic from Mount Utsu with the poem "Yukurinaku akugareideshi izayoi no tsuki ya okurenu katami narubeki." The text gives no name, and here too she is called only the lady who wrote of the lingering moon. These two poems are the exchange of the first spring Abutsu-ni spent in Kamakura.

Early spring of Koan 3 (1280), a poem in the letter that came from the capital to Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, by a sure hand and before very long.

It answers "Oboro naru tsuki wa miyako no sora nagara mada kikazarishi nami no yoruyoru."

With this poem the spring exchange ends, and the prose moves on to the scene in which she gathers her practice poems and sends them to the Gon-Chunagon.

The reply takes the sent poem's words in order and imagines the other's sleepless nights. The first line joins a negative conjecture to an exclamatory particle: you will not be sleeping. It begins by naming the other's condition. The second line takes the sent poem's second line and reverses its order, so that what was described as one moon in one sky becomes a moon carried away at her side. This is the same lady who, soon after Abutsu-ni's arrival, had written "Yukurinaku akugareideshi izayoi no tsuki ya okurenu katami narubeki," seeing the moon as something that goes with a traveller, and the same way of seeing returns here. The third line completes the restatement. The fourth line names the unfamiliar pillow of a traveller's rest, a term absent from the sent poem, adding a second reason for the sleeplessness. The closing line takes back the sent poem's last line whole, pivot and all. Accepting the sent poem's division — the moon shared with the capital, the waves belonging only to the east — the reply sets the other's sleepless pillow at the point where the two meet, and offers no word of comfort at all: naming the condition exactly is the whole of the sympathy. Some manuscripts give a slightly different form of the closing word.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other