Urayamashi ashimohikarezu watatsuumino ikanaruhitoni monotamauramu

English Translation

How I envy her
who does not drag her foot along —
out on the wide sea
what manner of one is she
that such things are given her

Meaning

How I envy her. What sort of person is that nun, who does not even drag her foot, that such gifts should be given to her?

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. An old nun appeared below the veranda begging for what was left of the offerings; given food she grew entirely familiar, and when the young ladies questioned her she sang a coarse little song and rolled her head about. The Empress had a robe given to her and sent her off — but the woman took to it, and afterwards made a point of walking where she would be seen, and from the words of her song she came to be called the Governor of Hitachi. She never changed into the white robe she had been given but went about in the same sooty clothes, so that the ladies grumbled about where it could have gone.

Later another mendicant nun appeared, this one of a notably refined bearing. Called over and spoken to, she seemed genuinely abashed, which was touching, and as before the Empress gave her a robe. The nun bowed to the ground, wept for joy and went away — and the Governor of Hitachi happened to be there and saw it. After that she was not seen for a long while.

The speaker of this poem is that same old nun. The one she speaks of is the nun who came later and received the robe, understood to have been lame.

The time is around the end of the twelfth month, at midday, when the snow mountain had shrunk a little but still stood high; the place is the veranda of the Office of the Empress's Household.

After her long absence the Governor of Hitachi appeared again and, asked why she had not been seen, answered that something distressing had happened, and that this was what she had been thinking; then she chanted out this poem, drawing out the ends of the lines.

The ladies laughed in irritation and would not look at her. She climbed the snow mountain, trampled about on it, and went off. When the author reported all this to the Right Palace Attendant, the answer came back: why did you not send someone with her? how pitiful, that she should have gone climbing the snow mountain in such an awkward state — at which everyone laughed again.

The first line is a bare adjective, feeling flung out before anything else. The second, that she does not even drag her foot, is taken to refer to the lameness of the nun who came later, and carries the grievance that someone less afflicted than herself should be so well treated.

The third line is conventionally a fixed epithet attaching to the word for a sea diver; here the same sound is made to introduce a Buddhist nun instead. That transfer is the trick of the poem, and the vastness of the sea invoked in passing widens the vagueness of the question that follows.

The fourth line asks what manner of person she can be, and the closing auxiliary is one of conjecture about a present state. The form is that of someone unable to account for what she has just seen; the substance is a jab at not having been treated the same way.

Where "Kokoninomi mezurashitomiru yukinoyama tokorodokoroni furinikerukana" turns disappointment into a joke on a pivot word, this one dresses a complaint in the form of a poem by shifting a fixed epithet — and the author, for all her irritation, set it down.

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other