Ikabakari ko o omou tsuru no tobiwakare narawanu tabi no sora ni nakuramu

English Translation

How it must be, now—
the crane that loves her children
has flown from them, and
cries somewhere under a sky
of travel she does not know.

Meaning

How must it be with her: the crane that loves her young has flown away from them, and cries under a travelling sky she does not know.

Commentary

Section 20 The Exchange with the Shin-Chunagon of Watoku-mon'in

The lady known as the Shin-Chunagon of Watoku-mon'in is a daughter of the Kyogoku Middle Counsellor Teika; her father placed her in the service of the former Ise Priestess of Fukakusa, and there she has remained through the years. Since that Priestess adopted the present retired empress as her child, the lady has passed with her and serves her still. She is a sister of the Mimbukyo no Suke who composed the lines about a sorrowing self and a seaweed-gathering boat. Being the child of such a man, she used to hide her own poems and insist that no one should hear them; but troubled by the uncertainty of Abutsu-ni's far-off journey, she wrote at length of moving things and set down a poem, running it on into the words of the letter so that it hardly looked like a poem at all. That seems to Abutsu-ni no ordinary attention. Abutsu-ni answers her. Then, taking the occasion, and thinking that this lady alone would be moved by it, she writes out and sends two poems about how the late Lay Novice Major Counsellor comes and stands beside her even on her grass pillow, appearing to her in dreams. The lady goes to great trouble to find a courier and answers again. That she had hidden her poems so strictly was, after all, a matter of the occasion. Two poems come from her.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Shin-Chunagon is a daughter of the Kyogoku Middle Counsellor Teika, placed by her father with the former Priestess of Fukakusa and grown old in that service; since the Priestess adopted the present retired empress, she passed with her and serves her still. Teika was the father of Abutsu-ni's late husband Tameie, so that the Shin-Chunagon is Tameie's sister and Abutsu-ni's late husband's sibling. The late Lay Novice Major Counsellor is Tameie himself, and the four poems in the second half of this section turn on dreams of him. It is because of that kinship that Abutsu-ni thought this lady alone would be moved.

Around the beginning of summer in Koan 3 (1280), a poem in a letter that reached Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura from the capital.

A lady who normally kept her own poems from being heard, troubled by the uncertainty of a far journey, wrote at length of moving things and set this down at the end, running it into the words of the letter so that it hardly looked like a poem.

Abutsu-ni answers, taking up the flying away and the love of children. It is this exchange that leads her to write of her dreams of the dead Tameie.

A poem of enquiry that lays the figure of a crane over a woman on the road. The first line means how much, setting the act of imagining first. The second line runs a syllable long; the crane is the bird conventionally used for a parent's love of its young, and the same figure appears in the long poem at the end of the diary, where she speaks of leaving the capital in tears like a crane at night for love of her children, so that it runs through the whole work. The third line, flying away and parting, states plainly what the other has done in leaving her children in the capital for the east. The fourth line, an unaccustomed journey, carries concern for one not used to travelling. In the closing line the verb means both that a bird cries and that a person weeps, and the present conjecture answers the interrogative of the first line. As the prose says, the poem was slipped into the letter so as hardly to look like one, and the faintness of the line between headnote and poem is itself taken as a mark of feeling.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other