Kumonouemo kurashikanekeru harunohio tokorogaratomo nagametsurukana

English Translation

Even above clouds
these spring days were hard to pass
and all the while here
I had gazed and thought it was
only the place I was in

Meaning

So even above the clouds the spring days were hard to get through — and I had been gazing at them, thinking it was only where I happened to be.

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 so tedious that she wanted to return to the Empress at once. A letter then arrived from Her Majesty containing "Ikanishite suginishikatao sugushikemu kurashiwazurau kinōkyōkana."

The Empress is Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijō. The owner of the house is not named.

The time is around the third month; the place is the house where the author was staying.

The immediate occasion is the Empress writing that she could hardly get through the days. This poem is the reply.

The same section also carries the author's remark on the willow at her lodgings, "Sakashirani yanaginomayuno hirogorite harunoomoteo fusuruyadokana," so that a poem laughing at a trifle stands beside a reply to her sovereign.

The first line uses the term for the palace — above the clouds — with a particle meaning even there, setting her own dull lodgings and the palace on the same footing from the outset. The second line rephrases the Empress's own words about being unable to get through the day, and adds an auxiliary of sudden realisation: reading the letter, she learns for the first time that it was the same at court.

The third line fixes the shared object as a single spring day. The fourth introduces the notion of place — the character of where one happens to be — and confesses the assumption she had been under, that the tedium was simply a matter of these surroundings.

In the close, the verb for gazing in thought carries its long-standing overtone of the long rains, folding the look of a spring day together with brooding; a completive and an exclamatory particle finish the line.

Where the Empress complained of days she could not get through, the reply neither denies the complaint nor offers comfort, but confirms that the two of them were in the same condition — and everything converges on the fact that both were finding the same spring days unbearable. The Empress had measured her feeling in time; the author answers by bringing in a second axis, that of place.

Author

Sei Shōnagon

Source

Makura no Soshi

Other