Azumaji no kusa no makura wa tōkeredo katareba chikaki inishie no yume

English Translation

The grass pillow lies
far off, on the eastern road—
and yet it comes near,
once it is spoken of: that
dream out of the ancient days.

Meaning

Your grass pillow on the eastern road is far away; and yet, once you tell of it, that dream of the old days comes close.

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 the reply that came to Kamakura from the capital, sent by a courier the lady went to great trouble to find.

It answers "Miyako made kataru mo tōshi omoine ni shinobu mukashi no yume no nagori o."

The prose observes that her strict habit of hiding her poems was, after all, a matter of the occasion, noting that this once she did not withhold them.

A distance called too great is closed by the single act of telling. The first line names the eastern road, where the other is. The second line, the grass pillow, is taken straight from the prose about him standing beside her there. The third line takes the adjective of farness from the sent poem's second line and turns it concessive, so that for a moment the sent poem's reasoning is granted. The fourth line takes the sent poem's verb of telling and recasts it as a condition: tell it, and it is near. The very ground of the distance becomes the ground of nearness. The closing line ends on a noun, restating in brief the sent poem's remnant of a dream of the old days. Like the replies of the Mikushige-dono and of her elder sister, which answered with the same sky and the same wind, this consoles a separation by naming one thing that can be shared; but what is named here is not a landscape, it is the act of speaking itself.

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other