Shirazarishi urayamakaze mo umegaka wa miyako ni nitaru haru no akebono

English Translation

This wind off the hills
by the sea I never knew—
but the scent of plum
is the scent of the city
here in the spring daybreak too.

Meaning

This wind from the hills above the shore is new to me; but the scent of plum is like the capital's, here in the spring daybreak.

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 is the second of the five practice poems gathered and sent.

The four poems that came back answer the first, third, fourth and fifth of the five, and this one alone receives no direct reply.

The poem sets the capital and the east against each other sense by sense. The first line means what she had never known before, pointing to what she has met only since coming east. The word in the second line names the wind that blows off hills standing above the shore, a single word for the very situation of her lodging; the particle adds. The particle in the third line singles out the scent for contrast: the wind is strange, but the fragrance. The fourth line modifies what follows and stops short of saying the same, saying only that it resembles. The closing line ends on a noun. Nothing that meets eye or ear is as it was in the capital, and only the smell is; the division follows on "Oboro naru tsuki wa miyako no sora nagara mada kikazarishi nami no yoruyoru" of the previous section, where the moon was shared and the waves were not. That this is the one poem of the five without an answer may be because it offers no opening word for a reply and simply reports what is there.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other