Akanesasu hinimukaitemo omoiideyo miyakowaharenu nagamesuramuto

English Translation

Where the madder glows
though you face the sun out there
remember me still —
in the capital the rains
will not clear, and I shall gaze

Meaning

Even facing the sun in Hyūga, remember this: in the capital the rains will not clear, and I shall be gazing out at them.

Commentary

240 The Nurse, the Lady Taifu no Myōbu

When the nurse, the lady Taifu no Myōbu, was going down to Hyūga, the Empress gave her a fan. On one side were painted country houses with the sun falling gently across them; on the other, a place in the capital with rain coming down hard. Written on it in the Empress's own hand was this poem.

Taifu no Myōbu served as nurse; myōbu is a title for women in palace service. The Empress is Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijō.

The time is her departure for her posting in the province of Hyūga; the place is the Empress's residence.

The poem accompanies a parting gift as the nurse leaves for a distant province, and the two painted faces of the fan correspond exactly to the two halves of the verse.

Reading it, the author reflects that no one could abandon so tender a mistress and go off to a far province. Through the contrast between the one who departs and the one who stays, the section becomes a statement of the author's own reluctance ever to leave her.

The first line is a fixed epithet for the sun, drawn from the glow of madder red. The second says facing the sun and at the same time conceals the name of the province she is bound for, so that a single phrase carries the destination. The concessive that follows extends it: even set down in that bright country, still.

The third line puts the request at the centre of the poem in the imperative: remember. The fourth says the capital will not clear, folding the painted rain together with an unclearing heart. In the close, the word for gazing in thought is also the word for the long rains, and the negative of the previous line attaches naturally to both. An auxiliary of conjecture places the speaker's state in a present the addressee cannot see, and the quotative particle at the very end binds the whole to the imperative: remember that this is how I shall be.

Fixed epithet, a place name hidden in a pun, and a second pun on gazing and rain — the devices are layered, yet none of them departs from the two pictures on the fan. The visual contrast of sunlit Hyūga and rainy capital is simply carried across into a contrast of words, so that gift and poem are one object, on the same principle as the verse wrapped around the blessing staves in the eighty-seventh section, "Yamatoyomu onononibikio tazunureba iwainotsueno otonizoarikeru."

Author

Empress Teishi

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other