Karisome ni tachiwakarete mo ko o omou omoi o Fuji no keburi to zo mishi

English Translation

Though we parted but
for a while, and I set out,
it was my longing,
the fire of it, whose smoke I
took for the smoke of Fuji.

Meaning

We parted only for a while; and what I took for the smoke of Fuji was the smoke of my own longing for my children, and its fire.

Commentary

Section 22 Tamemori's Thirty Poems and the Reply to Them

From the young lord Tamemori, the Jiju's younger brother, thirty poems also arrived, with a request that she mark them and set down in detail whatever was poor. He is sixteen this year. Since he is only beginning to write, she finds his work touching, and then feels awkward, thinking again that this is a parent's blind love. He too, in his travel poems, seems to have written with her in mind: she had sent the journal of her journey down to these children, and he must have read it. To one of the poems she writes an answer.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. Tamemori is the younger brother of the Jiju Tamesuke, the Taifu who in the section of parting poems set down in his writing practice "Harubaru to yukusaki tōku shitawarete ikani sonata no sora o nagamemu." The prose says he is sixteen this year, so he was fifteen when she left the capital in Koan 2. After his brother's fifty he sends thirty poems and asks her to mark them and note in detail whatever is poor. The prose also records that she had sent the journal of her journey down to these children, so that the record of the road had already been written out and had reached the capital.

After the second day of the eighth month of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, over the thirty poems that had come from the capital.

It answers Tamemori's "Tachiwakare Fuji no keburi o mite mo nao kokorobososa no ikani soikemu"; the prose says only that she wrote an answer to this one as well.

With this poem the exchange with Tamemori ends. The prose goes on to the Gon-Chunagon's careful letter, saying that since Abutsu-ni went down she has had no friend to write poems with, and that now autumn has come she remembers her more and more and lies awake gazing at the moon alone.

The reply moves the source of Fuji's smoke from the mountain to herself. The first line means only for a time, set first so as to reassure the child that this parting is not final. The second line takes over the sent poem's opening and turns concessive; the verb for setting out again sounds against the smoke below. The third line states plainly the mother's own feeling, where the sent poem had only guessed at her loneliness. In the fourth line the word for longing ends in the syllable that means fire, and so belongs by association with smoke. There the whole reply turns: what the sent poem took for the smoke of Fuji was not the mountain's smoke but the smoke off the fire of a mother's longing. Since the record of the road says the smoke of Fuji had failed, and sings of it in "Ta ga kata ni nabikihatete ka Fuji no ne no keburi no sue no miezu naruramu," the reply gives another origin to a smoke that could not have been seen. The closing line binds an emphatic particle to the verb: that is how I saw it. The method the travel poems of this diary have used all along, drawing an outward scene into the poet's own heart, is here shown almost as if the trick were being explained.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other