Kamigami to noborikudari wa waburedomo mada sakayukanu kokoro koso sure

English Translation

Calling on the gods,
I climb and I come down again,
and it is hard going;
and still the slope is not done,
and still my fortunes do not rise.

Meaning

Calling on the gods, I climb and come down again, and it is hard going; and still the slope is not finished, and still my fortunes do not rise.

Commentary

23 Poems Offered at Inari and Kamo

The ninth month came, and thinking that the world would be at its most beautiful, that she should like to go on a pilgrimage somewhere and lay before the god the frailty of her own situation, she set out very quietly to a certain place. On a single sheaf of offerings she wrote these poems: one for the lower shrine, one for the middle, one for the last. Then, at the end of the same month, she went in the same manner to another place, this time with two sheaves: two poems for the lower shrine and two for the upper. Such were the things she muttered where no god could hear them.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The place she visited in secret is understood to be Inari at Fushimi, since one of the poems names Mount Inari. The other place, visited at the end of the same month, is understood to be the Kamo shrines, since the poems speak of the purification stream and the sacred grove. The text names neither shrine, calling them only the lower, the middle and the last, and the lower and the upper.
It is the ninth month of the third year of Kōhō, and the place is the last shrine of the sanctuary she visited in secret.
After the poems for the lower and the middle shrine, this was written for the third and last.
At the end of the same month she went in the same manner to another sanctuary, where she wrote four poems beginning "Kami ya seku shimo ni ya mikuzu tsumoruramu omou kokoro no yukanu mitarashi."

The opening means: calling upon the gods as she goes, describing the walk from shrine to shrine. The second line names the climbing and descending, the actual movement of visiting the three sanctuaries. The third is adversative — hard though it is — and turns into what follows. The word in the fourth line means both that the slope is not yet finished and that one's fortunes are not rising, and the poem turns on it: the hill she cannot get to the top of and the life that will not improve become one, so that the labor of the pilgrimage is the labor of the life. The close is bound by an emphatic particle and states the feeling outright. Of the three poems, the first begins at the gate of the mountain, the second names the mountain, and the third ends on a slope that cannot be finished; the route from shrine to shrine is exactly the structure of the set.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other