Shinobine wa Hiki no yatsu naru hototogisu kumoi ni takaku itsuka nanoramu

English Translation

You keep your voice low
in the valley called Hiki,
cuckoo—when will you
cry out your name up above,
high in the reaches of cloud?

Meaning

Cuckoo of the valley they call Hiki, keeping your voice low: when will you call out your name high up among the clouds?

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 end of the fourth month of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura; the one poem of this section that stands outside the exchange.

The month was ending and she had given up hearing even a faint first note, when she heard at second hand that at a place called Hiki-no-yatsu a great many voices had been heard by someone; the poem came of that.

The prose adds that she turned this over alone and that there was no help in it, and goes on: 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, but that some rare person should have heard them seems to her, with all her heart, a thing to resent.

A grievance at being the only one who cannot hear the bird is turned into a question put to the bird. The first line names the low, secret call the cuckoo makes at the start of summer, the stage at which it is not yet known to anyone. The second line places the bird in the Hiki valley in Kamakura; the word for such a valley is the local one for a narrow fold in the hills, the same word that names Abutsu-ni's own lodging, Tsukikage-no-yatsu. The place-name she had heard at second hand is taken straight into the poem. The third line addresses the bird. In the fourth line the word for the high reaches of the sky also means the imperial palace. In the closing line the verb means to leave off the secret call and cry out aloud, and the interrogative and the conjecture together give the impatience of waiting for that time. It states plainly the bird's habit, that while the call is kept low no one knows of it, and it answers the prose remark that she resents the rare person who did hear. Where the other four poems of the section all belong to the traffic with the capital, this one alone puts a Kamakura place-name into verse, and its being a solitary poem shows in the change of key.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other