Itazura ni ama no shioyaku keburi to mo tare ka wa mimashi kaze ni kienaba

English Translation

Who would even see
it, and say: there is the smoke
of the salt-burners,
risen to no purpose—if
the wind should blow it away?

Meaning

If the wind blew it away, who would so much as look and call it the salt-burners' smoke, gone up to no purpose?

Commentary

Section 18 The Fever: The Exchange with Tameko

Toward the end of the third month she is taken with what may be the recurrent fever that usually afflicts children, and it comes back every other day, twice in all. Feeling strangely wilted through and through, she rises before dawn on the day it should have come a third time, and before the Buddha, with her whole mind fixed, she reads the Lotus Sutra. Whether by virtue of that or not, the fever leaves her without a trace. Just then there is a courier for the capital, and while sending news of this home she writes also to the Gon-Chunagon: that under the sky of a journey, in a forlornness close to danger, it must be by the power of the Law that her life has been held here until today. A poem goes with it. The lady, alarmed, sends her answer at once. Then, finding the power of the sutra deeply venerable, Abutsu-ni sets down one more poem.

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; since Tamenori was a son of Tameie and a younger brother of Tameuji, she is a granddaughter of Abutsu-ni's late husband. Since her poem of enquiry at the beginning of winter, and through the exchange of practice poems in spring, she has continued to write, and the correspondence goes on here. The prose has called her a woman who gives herself to poetry without distraction.

Around the end of the third month of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura; a poem in the letter sent by the courier for the capital just after her recovery.

The fever had come twice on alternate days; rising before dawn on the day it should have come a third time, she read the Lotus Sutra and it left her without a trace. A courier for the capital happening to be at hand, she wrote to the Gon-Chunagon while sending news home, saying that under the sky of a journey, in a forlornness close to danger, it must be by the power of the Law that her life had been held here until today, and added this poem.

The lady was alarmed and answered at once, taking up the words for vanishing, for the shore-folk and for salt, and turning them into a denial: it will not go out.

A reflection on nearly dying far from home is entrusted to the smoke of the salt fires. The first line means to no purpose, the same opening as "Itazura ni mekari shioyaku susabi ni mo koishi ya nareshi sato no amabito" in the spring exchange, and it likewise lays the work of the shore people over her own condition; the word for those people is also the word for a nun, which she is. The third line names the smoke, the type of what a wind can scatter, and it leads into the verb of vanishing below. In the fourth line a rhetorical particle and a counterfactual auxiliary state it flatly: no one would. The closing line is a conditional built on a perfective, and by inversion it returns to the fourth. Should she die under a traveller's sky, she would go out like smoke from the salt fires and catch no one's eye: the prose sentence about her life being held here until today is set straight into verse. Under the figure lies the fear of vanishing before the suit that took her from the capital has been settled.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other