Azumaji no sakura o mite mo wasurezuba miyako no hana o hito ya towamashi

English Translation

If, when you look on
the cherry of the east road,
you have not forgot,
would you not be the one to
ask of the flowers back home?

Meaning

If you have not forgotten me, even with the cherry of the eastern road before you, might you not be the one to ask how the flowers are here at home?

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 "Miyakobito omoi mo ideba Azumaji no hana ya ikani to otozurete mashi," and is the last of the four.

With it the spring exchange closes. The prose moves on to the end of the third month, when Abutsu-ni falls ill with what seems to be a recurrent fever and recovers after reading the Lotus Sutra, and the correspondence with the Gon-Chunagon continues there.

The reproach is handed back exactly reversed. The first line moves the sent poem's third line to the head, and from there the reply reassembles the sent poem's words in something like their own order. The particle in the second line carries a concessive shade: with the eastern cherry actually before you. The third line is a negative conditional and inverts the sent poem's second line: told that they would write if they so much as remembered, she answers, if you have not forgotten. The fourth line sets the capital's flowers against the eastern road's and exchanges the roles of asker and asked. In the closing line the word for that person means the correspondent herself, an interrogative particle follows, and the counterfactual auxiliary is the same one that ended the sent poem, so that the form is matched and only the direction reversed. A complaint that no letter comes is met with the question of whether the complainant might not have written first; and the refusal to answer reproach with reproach is the same treatment as in "Kokoro kara nani uramuramu tabigoromo tatsu hi o dani mo shirazugao nite," her reply to the Mikushige-dono.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other