なげきつゝかへす衣のつゆけきに
いとゝ空さへしぐれ添ふらむ
いとゝ空さへしぐれ添ふらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Nagekitsutsu kaesu koromo no tsuyukeki ni itodo sora sae shigure sou ramu
- English Translation
-
Sighing, you turn your
robe inside out; and its damp
must be why the sky
adds, on top of everything,
this cold rain of its own now.
- Meaning
- Your robe, turned inside out amid your sighing, is already damp; and now the sky must be adding its cold rain to it as well.
- Commentary
-
4 Exchanges with Kaneie
After the marriage was settled, the author stayed for a time at a temporary lodging. Kaneie visited her there and sent a letter the next morning. In the ninth month a run of days of abstinence kept him away for two nights together, and only letters passed. His visits then grew infrequent; on a rainy evening he sent word that he would come, and in the tenth month he pleaded abstinence as a reason for staying away. Poems were exchanged on each occasion, and the author's helplessness as the one who waits accumulates through them. While these exchanges continue, the day approaches when her father Tomoyasu must go down to Mutsu.
Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke and at this time Assistant Commander of the Right Guards; he would rise to be regent and chancellor. The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu, a man of the provincial governor class who would go down to Mutsu as its governor at the end of this year.
It is the tenth month of the eighth year of Tenryaku, and the place is the author's own dwelling.
Word had come from her side, uneasily, that she was under a day of abstinence, and Kaneie sent this poem in response.
Her answer was "Omoi araba hinamashi mono o ikadekawa kaesu koromo no tare mo nururamu," which the narrative describes as very old-fashioned. Soon afterward the account moves on to her father Tomoyasu's departure for Mutsu.
The opening means while sighing continually. The robe of the second line refers to the belief of the time that one who turned a garment inside out to sleep in it would see the beloved in a dream; it is the gesture of those who cannot meet. The third line says the robe is damp with tears, following the same figure of dew for tears used in "Kiekaeru tsuyu mo mada hinu sode no ue ni kesa wa shigururu sora mo warinashi." The particle in the fourth line is additive: and on top of that, even the sky. The conjectural ending imagines the state of someone at a distance. He says nothing of why he cannot come, and instead shows concern for the tears on her sleeve — a manner characteristic of Kaneie's poems in this period.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kaneie
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- Because my own heart has gone out to you and turned to sky, this morning must look to you as though the cold rain were falling from it.
- The grass beneath the oak grove: at each fall of dusk am I told to hope once more — while I watch the rain come leaking through the branches?
- Were there a fire of longing, it would have dried by now; so how can it be that the robe turned inside out is wet, on either side?
- Setting out with none but you to rely upon, my heart looks ahead and what is yet to come seems far, and further still, from here.