Kurabe miyo kasumi no uchi no haru no tsuki harenu kokoro wa onaji nagame o

English Translation

Set them side by side:
the spring moon within the haze
is the moon I see;
and a heart that will not clear
looks out on the same prospect.

Meaning

Compare them: the spring moon within the haze is the one I see too, and a heart that will not clear looks out on the very same view.

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 "Hanagumori nagamete wataru urakaze ni kasumi tadayou haru no yo no tsuki," and is the second of the four.

It is followed by the poem on white waves and falling blossom and the poem on the cherry of the eastern road.

Here the reply-pattern of this diary, consoling separation by saying that one is looking at the same thing, appears at its plainest. The first line is an imperative: compare them. The posture of setting the other's scene beside one's own is declared at the outset. The second and third lines take over, in their original order, the fourth and closing lines of the sent poem, and by those two lines it is clear which poem is answered. The verb in the fourth line means that haze or cloud clears, transferred to a heart that will not, and it belongs by association with the haze above. The closing line turns the sent poem's verb of gazing into a noun, and the particle left after it produces an inversion back to the imperative of the first line. After the Mikushige-dono answered with the same sky in "Kakikurashi yuki furu sora no nagame ni mo hodo wa kumoi no aware o zo shiru," and her elder sister with the same wind in "Tamazusa o miru ni namida no kakaru kana iso kosu kaze wa kiku kokochi shite," the same view is offered here as consolation.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other