Kokoninomi mezurashitomiru yukinoyama tokorodokoroni furinikerukana

English Translation

Here and here alone
I had thought it rare to see
this mountain of snow —
yet in place after place
it has fallen, and grown old

Meaning

This mountain of snow I took for a rarity here alone has, it seems, been falling — and growing stale — in every quarter.

Commentary

87 While Her Majesty Was at the Office of the Empress's Household, in the Western Aisle

While the Empress was staying at the Office of the Empress's Household, continuous sutra readings were held in the western aisle, with images hung and monks in attendance. An old nun appeared below the veranda begging for what was left of the offerings; given fruit and rice cakes she grew entirely familiar and talked at length, and when the young ladies questioned her she sang a coarse little song and rolled her head about. The Empress, overhearing, said it was a disgraceful thing to have encouraged, had a robe given to her and sent her off. The woman came afterwards to be known as the Governor of Hitachi.

Then, past the tenth of the twelfth month, snow fell heavily, and seeing it heaped on the veranda someone proposed building a real mountain of it in the garden. Guards and officials of the Palace Works joined in until some twenty people were raising it high. The Empress asked how long it would last; the ladies answered ten days, a little more than ten, but the author alone declared it would stand past the tenth of the first month, and would not be moved. Rain on the twentieth did not melt it; it only lost a little of its height.

The Empress is Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijō; Tadataka, who came as imperial messenger, was a third-rank officer of the Ministry of Ceremonial. The Office of the Empress's Household was then serving as her residence.

The time is the day the snow mountain was built, past the tenth of the twelfth month.

On that same day Tadataka arrived as messenger and remarked that there was nowhere without a snow mountain today — one in the courtyard before the Emperor, one at the Crown Prince's, one at the Kokiden, one at the Kyōgoku mansion as well. The author had a lady beside her speak this poem for her.

Tadataka tilted his head again and again, said he would not spoil so fine a verse by attempting a reply, that it was elegantly done, and that he would recite it to everyone before the blinds, and went off. He was said to be fond of poetry, which made his behaviour odd. When the Empress heard of it she remarked that he must have thought himself very clever indeed.

A limiting particle in the first line fixes the mistaken assumption: here, and only here. The second line states the belief plainly — a thing seen as a rarity — and the third rests on the noun before handing over to the second half.

Everything turns on the close, where the verb for snow falling is also the verb for growing old and stale. On the surface: so it has been snowing everywhere. Underneath: so these have been going up everywhere, and ours was never rare at all. A completive auxiliary followed by one of sudden realisation marks the discovery as happening in that instant, and the final particle gathers it up.

Tadataka's report is nothing but idle news that others have the same thing; the author takes it as the moment her assumption of uniqueness collapses, and turns the disappointment into a light joke on a single pivoting word. The other pivoting poem in this section, "Urayamashi ashimohikarezu watatsuumino ikanaruhitoni monotamauramu," works by the same means, so that the long account of the snow mountain carries three poems of quite different character.

Author

Sei Shōnagon

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other