Ikanishite suginishikatao sugushikemu kurashiwazurau kinōkyōkana

English Translation

However was it
that the days now gone were passed
I can scarcely tell —
yesterday and today here
are days I can hardly live

Meaning

However did I get through the days that are past? These last two days I can hardly get through at all.

Commentary

301 Around the Third Month, Going Off for a Period of Abstinence

Having gone to stay at someone's house for a period of ritual abstinence in the third month, the author found the days there so tedious that she wanted to return to the Empress at once. A letter then arrived from Her Majesty with this poem in it.

The Empress is Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijō. The owner of the house where the author was staying is not named.

The time is around the third month; the places are the house where she was staying and the Empress's residence.

The immediate occasion is the author's absence from court for the days of her abstinence. The loneliness of that absence is put entirely in terms of the difficulty of getting through a day.

The author answered with "Kumonouemo kurashikanekeru harunohio tokorogaratomo nagametsurukana." The same section also holds her remark on the willow at her lodgings, "Sakashirani yanaginomayuno hirogorite harunoomoteo fusuruyadokana," so that private joking and a formal exchange between mistress and attendant stand side by side.

The opening interrogative pairs with the auxiliary of past conjecture in the third line to cast doubt over the past itself: how on earth were those days got through? The second line, with a past attributive, names the time that has gone by.

The verb for passing appears twice, once intransitive and once transitive: days that once went by of themselves must now be actively got through. That repetition is what produces the sense of ordinary life having stopped being ordinary.

The fourth line means to be at a loss how to get through the day, the verb carrying the note of being stuck and unable to manage. The close narrows the span to yesterday and today alone, ending on an exclamatory particle. Setting the whole of the past against two days makes the weight of the time since the other's departure the only thing in view.

Nothing is said of loneliness or of waiting — only that the days are hard to get through. As in the Empress's "Yamachikaki iriainokaneno koegotoni kōrukokorono kazuwashiruramu," where feeling is entrusted to the count of the bell, the emotion is never named but converted into a quantity of time.

Author

Empress Teishi

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other