Yamanoino shizukuninigoru mizuyorimo kowanaoakanu kokochikososure

English Translation

More than the mountain
spring clouded by the droplets
falling from cupped hands,
this water here leaves me still
further from having enough

Meaning

More than that mountain spring clouded by the drops from cupped hands, this water here leaves me feeling I have had nothing like enough.

Commentary

Section 15: The Father Passed Over at the Appointments; the Beauty of the Eastern Hills

At the appointments in the first month of the new year the author's father should have received a post, but the hope came to nothing. On that fruitless morning a poem arrived from someone who must have felt the same, with a note about the restlessness of lying awake for daybreak, telling himself that surely this time it would come; and the author replied.
Toward the end of the fourth month, for reasons that had to be met, the household moved to a place in the Eastern Hills. Along the road the seedbeds with water let into them and the fields already planted stretched away, greening faintly and pleasant to look at. In the evening, with the shadow of the hills falling dark and close before the house, forlorn and full of feeling, a water rail called and called, and she made a poem.
Ryōzen being close by, she went to worship there; finding it hard going, she stopped at a stone-ringed spring at the mountain temple and drank from her cupped hands. Someone said one could never drink enough of that water, and the author made a poem, to which he replied. On their return, with the evening sun striking clear and the whole of the capital visible in the distance, this man, saying he must go back to the city, felt the parting keenly, and sent another poem the next morning.
When the sound of a monk at his dawn devotions came to her, solemn to hear, she pushed open the door: the ridgeline was paling into light, mist lay over the dark treetops, and the sky closed in by all that foliage, cloudy and lovely, pleased her more than blossom or maples at their height. A cuckoo, too, called over and over from a bough close at hand, and she made a poem of that daybreak and that voice.
Near the end of the month a cuckoo cried noisily from a tree down toward the valley, and she composed again. As she sat gazing, the woman who was with her said: is there anyone in the city hearing this voice now, anyone who spares a thought for us sunk in reverie here? and made a poem, which the author answered.
Near what she took for daybreak, a sound came from the hills as of many people approaching. Startled, she looked out and saw a deer that had come as far as the veranda and was belling there—a voice with no charm in it heard from close by. She made a poem on that, and another on hearing that an acquaintance had come near the house and turned back.

The author is known only as the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. Her father is Sugawara no Takasue, who hoped for a post at these appointments and was passed over. Of "the person of the same mind," "the man who drank the water," and "the woman who was with her," the text gives neither name nor station. Ryōzen is one of the peaks of the Eastern Hills, where a mountain temple stood.

After the fourth month of Manju 2 (1025), at the stone-ringed spring of the mountain temple at Ryōzen.

It answers the author, who had turned to him with "Okuyamano ishimanomizuo musubiagete akanumonotowa imanomiyashiru."

On the way back, as the sun went down, this man said he must return to the capital, and feeling the parting keenly he sent "Yamanohani iribinokagewa irihatete kokorobosokuzo nagameyarareshi" the next morning.

This poem too draws on Ki no Tsurayuki's verse in the Kokinshū about the mountain spring clouded by drops from cupped hands, and its first half uses that poem's words almost unchanged.

Yama no i no is the mountain spring of the older poem, and shizuku ni nigoru repeats its phrase outright, borrowing the picture of water clouded by drops falling from lifted hands. Mizu yori mo sets up the comparison; ko in the fourth line is this water here, and nao makes the degree greater still. The close binds the emphatic koso to sure, the perfective-conditional of the verb su. He is speaking of the taste of water, but with the older poem's second half—parting from someone before one has had enough of them—standing behind it, the sense of being unwilling to part comes through. Where the author's poem asked whether he knew the old verse, this one answers by showing that he does and going one better, and the two make a single piece of wit.

Source

Sarashina Nikki

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