Kakemakumo kashikokikamino shirushiniwa tsurunoyowaito narinubekikana

English Translation

Even to speak it
is awe enough — that god's name
and for a token
I shall surely come to have
the long years given the crane

Meaning

As a sign of the god whose name it is awe enough even to speak, I shall surely be given the long years of the crane.

Commentary

277 Talking with the Others Before Her Majesty

Once, in conversation before the Empress, the author said that when the world felt so vexing and unbearable that she could not stand another moment of it and wanted only to go off anywhere at all, the mere sight of good white paper and a decent brush would console her past all measure and make her feel she could go on living after all. The Empress laughed and said it was a very slight thing to be comforted by.

Later, when the author had withdrawn to her home with something weighing on her, the Empress sent a messenger expressly with twenty sheets of fine paper and word that she should return at once. The accompanying note said, in effect, that this was the paper she had spoken of, though not good enough for copying out a sutra of long life.

The Empress is Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijō. The reason for the author's absence is given only as something on her mind.

The time is her stay at home; the place is her own house.

The immediate occasion is that the Empress had remembered her remark about paper and sent the paper itself. She replied with this poem, adding that perhaps it was going too far.

Some days afterwards a man in a red robe brought a mat and left it, and when she sent to ask where it came from he had already gone. It was one of the fine mats used for a person of rank, and though she suspected the Empress's hand in it she could not verify it, until she wrote to the Lady of the Right Capital and was told that Her Majesty had gone to great lengths to keep it secret — which was exactly what she had thought.

The first line, that it is awe enough even to speak the name, joins with the second in the formal manner reserved for addressing a god. Calling the giver a god rather than naming the Empress avoids direct reference and pays the highest possible respect.

The third line uses the word for a sign of divine favour or efficacy. The fourth invokes the crane, said to live a thousand years, as a figure for long life — answering the note that said the paper was not good enough for a sutra of long life by claiming that the paper itself will lengthen her days without any sutra at all.

The close pairs a completive with an auxiliary of confident expectation — it will surely be so — and ends on an exclamatory particle. Her own remark, that paper was enough to keep her alive, is thus rebuilt as an account of divine efficacy, so that the joke the Empress laughed at comes back as a formal expression of thanks. Her earlier "Motometemo kakaruhachisuno tsuyuooite ukiyonimatawa kaerumonokawa" also turns on a religious occasion, but where that poem argues for the solemnity of a service, this one lifts an everyday gift into the language of the gods — the same materials used to opposite effect.

Author

Sei Shōnagon

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other