Hototogisu tazunetekikishi koeyorimo shitawarabikoso koishikarikere

English Translation

That cuckoo of ours
whose voice we sought out to hear —
more than that, far more
it is the young bracken shoots
that I find myself longing for

Meaning

More than the cuckoo's voice we went all that way to hear, it is the young bracken that I long for.

Commentary

99 The Season of the Fifth-Month Abstinence

During the fifth-month abstinence, while the Empress was at the Office of the Empress's Household, the two rooms before the storeroom had been specially fitted out, and the unfamiliar arrangement was pleasing. From the first of the month it was rainy and overcast, and out of idleness someone said she would like to go and hear the cuckoo — at which every lady wanted to go. Stopping at the house of the lord Akinobu deep in Kamo, they found a rustic place with real charm, and cuckoos calling constantly. Their host set out food and said he had picked the young bracken himself. Word came that rain was likely, and they hurried into the carriages, breaking off deutzia blossom and thrusting it into the blinds and the roof of the carriage until it looked as though a hedge of the flowers had been hitched to the ox. They said they would compose their poems here, then said the road would do as well, and all climbed in — and in the end the cuckoo poems were never made.

The lord Akinobu is Takashina no Akinobu, brother of Takashina no Kishi, the Empress's mother, and thus the Empress's uncle. The lady called Saishō no Kimi was a senior lady of the household, ranked with the author as a woman of talent.

The time is the fifth month, the place the Office of the Empress's Household, and the subject the outing to Kamo a few days earlier.

Two days later, as they were talking over that day, Saishō no Kimi asked how the young bracken had been — the bracken their host claimed to have picked himself. The Empress, overhearing, laughed that this should be what came to mind, wrote the closing lines on a stray sheet of paper, and told the author to supply the opening. The author wrote out her lines and presented them.

The Empress laughed and said she had put it very boldly, and asked why she had gone out of her way to bring the cuckoo into it. Abashed, the author replied that she had resolved not to compose poems at all, and that when told to produce one on an occasion she felt she could not remain in service — which leads on to her plea about not wishing to shame her father's name. The scene sets up the later moment when the Empress writes "Motosukega nochitoiwaruru kimishimoya koyoinoutani hazuretewaoru."

In this poem the closing lines came first and the opening lines were added afterwards, so that the order of composition runs against the order of reading. The Empress's half binds an emphatic particle to a perfective ending, making the limitation forceful: the bracken, of all things. The comedy of remembering food when the outing was for a bird depends on exactly that force.

The author's half sets the bird in the first line, and in the second compresses the whole excursion into a single past attributive: the voice we went and sought out. The comparative in the third line opens a frame that closes on the Empress's emphatic particle, so that upper and lower halves lock into one sentence.

The Empress's joke is about the gap between going out in search of elegance and coming home thinking about lunch. The author does not deny it; she puts the most elegant of seasonal images at the head of the poem and then, in her own words, ranks the bracken above it. Rather than deflecting the teasing she rebuilds it as the frame of the poem — a good instance of the rhythm of exchange between mistress and attendant that this section returns to again and again.

Author

Sei Shōnagon (opening lines), Empress Teishi (closing lines)

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other