Hito yori mo kokoro tsukushite hototogisu tada hitokoe o kyō zo kikitsuru

English Translation

More than anyone
I have spent my heart on it,
and today at last
I have heard it: one single
note of the cuckoo, no more.

Meaning

I have spent more heart on it than anyone, and today at last I heard it: one note of the cuckoo, and no more.

Commentary

Section 19 The Cuckoo: The Exchange with Tameko

At the beginning of the fourth month a courier is going, and she writes again to the same Gon-Chunagon, saying among other things how she misses last year's spring and summer, and sends two poems. A reply comes again. It says that the grass and the trees are unchanged, just as she saw them last year, and yet nothing feels as it did — the poem running straight on into the prose of the letter — and then, turning to the question about the cuckoo, gives another poem. The lady adds that the Middle Captain Sanekata, having heard no cuckoo by the fifth month, is said to have sent from the province of Mutsu the lines about a cuckoo grown stale in the ears of the capital while the one on this side of the barrier suffers; that she was put in mind of that precedent, and that this letter of Abutsu-ni's was particularly graceful. Meanwhile the end of the fourth month came, and Abutsu-ni gave up hearing even a faint first note. Then she heard at second hand that at a place called Hiki-no-yatsu a great many voices had been heard by someone, and on hearing it she turns a poem over alone; but there is no help in it. Perhaps in the east, all the way to the far end of Mutsu, cuckoos have always been rare. If they did not sing at all it would be easier; that some rare person should have heard them seems to her, with all her heart, a thing to resent.

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. After the enquiry in winter, the practice poems in spring and the exchange during the fever, the correspondence continues here with the same person. The Middle Captain Sanekata cited in the letter is the mid-Heian poet Fujiwara no Sanekata, who went down to the east as governor of Mutsu.

The fourth month of Koan 3 (1280), a poem in the reply that came from the capital to Kamakura.

It answers "Natsugoromo haya tachikaete miyakobito ima ya matsuramu yama hototogisu," and is introduced by the words, and now, as to your question about the cuckoo.

It is followed by the precedent of the Middle Captain Sanekata, who heard no cuckoo by the fifth month and sent lines about it from the province of Mutsu; the lady says she was put in mind of that, and that this letter was particularly graceful.

A conjecture is answered with the fact of one particular day. The first line means more than anyone else, and where the sent poem had gathered the capital into a single body of people, this picks one of them out. The second line means to spend one's heart on a thing, to wear oneself in longing, and it gives weight to the waiting. The third line sets the sent poem's closing noun at the centre of the line. In the fourth line the adverb means no more than that, marking how little came of all the waiting, and telling her that even in the capital the bird is not easily had. The closing line binds an emphatic particle to a perfective and fixes the whole poem on this one day. The sent poem guessed that the people of the capital must be waiting; the reply says that she waited exactly so and heard it only today, and this way of filling in a conjecture with fact is the same as in "Tabigoromo urakaze saete Kaminazuki shigururu kumo ni yuki zo furisou" in winter. The consolation — that it is not only you who cannot hear it — is delivered by way of a number.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other