Sonohitono nochitoiwarenu minariseba koyoinoutao mazuzoyomamashi

English Translation

Were I not the one
spoken of as that man's child
were I not so called
then tonight I would have been
the first of all to compose

Meaning

Were I not one whom people call that man's child, I would have been the first tonight to make a poem.

Commentary

99 The Season of the Fifth-Month Abstinence

Out of the talk about the outing to Kamo, the Empress set down the closing lines of a poem and the author supplied the opening, producing "Hototogisu tazunetekikishi koeyorimo shitawarabikoso koishikarikere." On that occasion the author explained that she had resolved not to compose poems, and that she did not wish to shame her father's name. Late that night, while the Empress set topics and had her ladies composing, the author alone would not, and even when the Palace Minister pressed her she went on saying that she had made it a rule not to. When the time came to judge the verses, the Empress wrote "Motosukega nochitoiwaruru kimishimoya koyoinoutani hazuretewaoru" and tossed it across to her.

The Empress is Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijō. The man referred to in the poem is the author's father Kiyohara no Motosuke, one of the five scholars of the Pear Chamber who compiled the Gosen Wakashū. The Palace Minister is Fujiwara no Korechika, the Empress's elder brother by the same mother.

The time is the fifth month, late at night; the place is the Office of the Empress's Household.

Reading the Empress's poem, the author laughed aloud and answered on the spot with this one, taking the very name the Empress had used against her and adopting it as her own reason.

With the poem she added that if only there were nothing to hold her back, a thousand verses would come of themselves — presenting the restraint proper to one who carries such a name as both the reason she does not compose and the proof that she could.

The first line points at the father without naming him, indicating only the name the Empress had used. Declining to say it aloud keeps her earlier plea and her present posture of a piece.

The second line inverts the Empress's phrase exactly, stacking a negative on the passive to construct a hypothetical self: one who is not so spoken of. The third line opens a counterfactual conditional that will be answered by the final auxiliary — as things are it is not so, but if it were.

The fourth line repeats the Empress's own fourth line, keeping both poems in the same room and the same night. The close pairs an adverb meaning before anyone else with an emphatic particle binding the counterfactual auxiliary into its attributive form: I would have composed first of all. The claim is not that she cannot but that she chooses not, and it is carried entirely by the grammar of a condition contrary to fact.

Where the Empress's poem pressed its subject home by piling up particles, this one turns the argument on a single counterfactual, using the same words to reverse the standing of the person who was reproached. Nothing is being judged here in the way of poetic skill; what is made into a poem is the argument about poetry itself, which places this verse on a continuous line with "Hototogisu tazunetekikishi koeyorimo shitawarabikoso koishikarikere" earlier in the same section.

Author

Sei Shōnagon

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other