Ikani shite shibashi miyako o wasuregai nami no hima naku ware zo kudakuru

English Translation

However I try
to forget the capital
a while, and gather
forgetting-shells, the waves break
without pause, and I break too.

Meaning

However I try to forget the capital a while, gathering forgetting-shells, the waves come without pause, and I am broken as they are.

Commentary

Section 17 The Exchange with Tameko

The Gon-Chunagon is a woman who gives herself to poetry without distraction, and so Abutsu-ni gathers together the poems she has lately been writing as practice and sends them to her. Since she lives near the sea, she adds that even when she picks up shells there, this is not the shore of Nagusa and she is not consoled after all; and she sends five poems. She had written them just as the brush ran, as she pleased, and the messenger being in haste they were left looking half-finished; and the reply came back with no delay at all. In it the lady writes that the uncertainty of these days has cleared away, like haze, with this letter, and four poems come with it. The four sent from the capital answer the first, third, fourth and fifth of the poems Abutsu-ni had sent.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Gon-Chunagon is the daughter of Tamenori, the former Captain of the Right Watch, and serves in the household of Omiya-in. Tamenori was a son of Tameie and a younger brother of Tameuji, and the elder half-brother of Tamesuke, so that the Gon-Chunagon is a granddaughter of Abutsu-ni's late husband. She had already written at the start of winter with "Harubaru to omoi koso yare tabigoromo namida shigururu hodo ya ikani to," and this exchange continues that correspondence. The prose calls her a woman who gives herself to poetry without distraction, and this is the section in which the most poems pass between them anywhere in the Kamakura chapters.

Spring of Koan 3 (1280); one of five practice poems sent from Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura to the capital.

It went with a note saying that even when she picks up shells there, near the sea as she is, this is not the shore of Nagusa and she is not consoled after all; it is the first of the five.

The reply is "Tanomu zo yo shiohi ni hirou utsusegai kai aru nami no tachikaeru yo o," which takes over the shell and the waves of this poem.

Shells and waves of the shore are used to say that one cannot forget however one tries. The first line means somehow or other, and it announces in advance that the effort will fail. The second line names what is to be forgotten and runs on into the third. The shell named there is the one said to make a person forget their longing if they pick it up; read from above it is the verb to forget, and below it stands as the name of the shell, so that the line turns on a single word. The fourth line says that the waves come without a break, which suits the wind and surf the prose keeps mentioning. In the closing line the verb means both that a shell is broken and that a heart is broken, and an emphatic particle bound to it fixes everything on the one word for herself. Shell, wave and breaking hang together as words of the coast. The note about not being consoled because this is not the shore of Nagusa is worked into the poem as the failure of the forgetting-shell, so that headnote and poem run continuously.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other