Kazukazu ni kimi katayorite hiku nareba yanagi no mayu mo ima zo hirakuru

English Translation

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.

Meaning

Time after time you lean our way and draw with us, and so the willow's brows unknit themselves at last, this very moment.

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. The earlier poem is what was written on it. 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.
It is one of the answers made by the archers to "Yamakaze no mae yori fukeba tako no haru no yanagi no ito wa shirie ni zo yoru," written on the green paper of the stake.
The narrative says that answers were made all round but that the reader may judge from their having been forgotten, and sets down this one alone.

He takes back her willow unchanged. The opening means again and again, and carries with it the repeated rounds of the contest. The verb in the second line means to lean to one side, and it receives directly her declaration of partisanship for the rear. The verb in the third means both to draw a bow and to pull at a willow branch, and that single word ties the scene of the shooting to the scene of the tree. The fourth line likens the opening willow leaves to eyebrows, using the familiar term. The close is bound by an emphatic particle: now those brows unknit. To unknit the brows is to be relieved and glad, so that the pleasure of having gained a partisan is laid over the image of a willow coming into leaf. Where she had shown her allegiance by the quarter of the wind, he returns his thanks by the opening of a brow; on the axis of a single willow branch given as a stake, two people at the same gathering exchange a scene.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other