山風のまへよりふけばたこの春の
やなぎのいとはしりへにぞよる
やなぎのいとはしりへにぞよる
- Roma-ji
-
Yamakaze no mae yori fukeba tako no haru no yanagi no ito wa shirie ni zo yoru
- English Translation
-
Since the mountain wind
blows from the front, the willow
threads of the spring at
Tako lean away, and lean
toward the rear — toward us.
- Meaning
- Since the mountain wind blows from the front, the willow threads of that spring lean back — toward the rear.
- Commentary
-
33 The Stake at the Small-Bow Match
About the middle of the third month these people divided into sides and set about a match at the small bow, with a great to-do of coming and going on both parts. On the day when the whole of the rear side gathered here to hold it, they asked the gentlewomen for a stake; and — perhaps because nothing came at once to hand — for a poor sort of joke a sheet of green paper was tied to a willow branch and produced. What was written on it is this poem. Answers were made all round, but the reader may judge from the fact that they have been forgotten. One of them ran as follows.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Neither the gentlewoman who gave the stake nor the archer who answered is named in the text. The small bow was an indoor game, contested between sides called the front and the rear.
It is the middle of the third month of the second year of Anna, and the place is the author's dwelling.
On the day the rear side gathered to shoot, they asked the gentlewomen for a stake; nothing suitable came at once to hand, and so, for a poor joke, a sheet of green paper tied to a willow branch was produced. This is the poem written on that paper.
The archers answered all round, but the narrative records only one, remarking that the rest have been forgotten: "Kazukazu ni kimi katayorite hiku nareba yanagi no mayu mo ima zo hirakuru."
The opening raises a wind and carries into the second line, where the front means the opposing side: the wind, she says, blows from there. The place name in the third line is disturbed in the base text and its form is not settled, though it is easiest taken as a locality introducing the willow. The fourth line likens the slender willow withes to threads, the familiar figure, and the branch actually produced as a stake enters the poem unchanged. In the close, the word for the rear is the side gathered there that day, and the verb means both to lean under a wind and to twist a thread. The argument is that since the wind comes from the front the willow threads must lean backward — so that partisanship for the rear side is displayed entirely within the image. Using the stake itself as the material of the poem, and converting the names of the sides into a direction of wind, it is a piece of wit made for the moment and no longer.
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- Is it for you, who have a surplus every year, that the calendar sets down an extra month — an intercalary one?
- O peach blossom — we are sending out to seek those connoisseurs of ours as far as the country of the Queen Mother of the West.
- Time after time you lean our way and draw with us, and so the willow's brows unknit themselves at last — now, at this very moment.
- Of all times, now, with the fifth-month rains coming down like this — the far-off person, who was rare enough before, lets the days fall past.