Kie mo seji Waka no uraji ni toshi o hete hikari o souru ama no moshiobi

English Translation

It will not go out.
On the shore road of the Bay
of Poetry, through
the long years, it adds its light—
the seaweed fire of the shore.

Meaning

It will not go out: the seaweed fire of the shore, that has added its light along the road of the Bay of Poetry all these years.

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.

Late spring of Koan 3 (1280), a poem in the reply hurried back from the capital to Kamakura in alarm.

It answers "Itazura ni ama no shioyaku keburi to mo tare ka wa mimashi kaze ni kienaba," and the prose says that the lady was startled and answered quickly.

After this reply comes one more poem of Abutsu-ni's, prompted by the venerable power of the sutra.

By putting fire where the other had put smoke, the reply turns a thing that vanishes into a thing that does not. The first line is a negative conjecture, denying head-on the last line of the sent poem, and in that one line the whole attitude of the answer is set. The second line names the bay in Kii that also stands for the way of Japanese poetry, as in "Waka no ura ni kakitodometaru moshiogusa kore o mukashi no katami tomo miyo" among the parting poems and "Narumigata waka no urakaze hedatezuba onaji kokoro ni kami mo ukuramu" offered at Atsuta. The third line, through the long years, shifts the scale from a single illness to the years of a house of poetry. The fourth line says that it adds light, so that far from going out she is among the things that illuminate. The closing line names the fire in which seaweed is burnt for salt, and the substitution of fire for the sent poem's smoke is the point of the whole poem, since smoke scatters on the wind and a fire is kept burning. Moreover the word for the seaweed is the same as in the notebooks entrusted to a child, so that the shore work the sent poem used to belittle itself is taken back as a fire lighting the way of poetry. Bay, shore-folk, salt, fire and vanishing are carried over as words of the coast from the poem it answers.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

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