Tanomu zo yo shiohi ni hirou utsusegai kai aru nami no tachikaeru yo o

English Translation

I set my hope on
it: the empty shells we pick
up at the low tide,
and the day the waves come back
and make the finding worth while.

Meaning

I set my hopes on it: the day when the waves turn back and make even the empty shells of low tide worth the gathering.

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 the four poems in the reply that came back from the capital without delay.

It answers "Ikani shite shibashi miyako o wasuregai nami no hima naku ware zo kudakuru," and is the first of the four.

With these four the spring exchange ends, and the prose moves on to the fever at the end of the third month.

To a correspondent who has written of being broken, the reply answers that a day worth having will come. The first line joins an emphatic particle to an exclamatory one, giving the tone of speaking directly to her: I am counting on it. The second line means to gather at the ebb, taking over the scene of shell-gathering from the sent poem. The third line names the empty shell, setting a different shell against the forgetting-shell of the sent poem and choosing one that is hollow, which is a way of acknowledging the other's present state. In the fourth line one word means both that there are shells and that a thing is worth while, and by that word alone the hollow shell is turned to profit; in the same line, the waves turning back means both the surf returning and the other's return to the capital, and shell, ebb tide and wave are carried over from the sent poem as words of the coast. The closing line names a time, ending on a noun with a particle that turns back by inversion to the verb of hoping in the first line. The sent poem ended in breaking; the reply ends in a day to be hoped for, refusing to answer grief with more grief.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other