ましみづのまして程ふる物ならば
おなじぬれまにもおりも立ちなむ
おなじぬれまにもおりも立ちなむ
- Roma-ji
-
Mashimizu no mashite hodo furu mono naraba onaji nurema ni mo ori mo tachinamu
- English Translation
-
Like water risen
higher — if the days must fall
and fall the more, then
since I am to be wet in
any case, I shall wade out.
- Meaning
- Like water risen higher: if the days must fall the more, then since I shall be wet in any case, I may as well wade out to you.
- Commentary
-
35 Exchange with Kaneie in the Mountain Temple
While they were still fixing on the end of the third month for the shooting, events in the world intervened and the match was forgotten: there was the uproar of the Minister of the Left of Nishinomiya being sent into exile. Then, past the twentieth of the month of the fifth-month rains, with a period of abstinence upon him and a long fast begun, Kaneie shut himself up in a mountain temple. Gazing out at the heavy rain he wrote, no doubt, that it was a very forlorn place. She answered with a poem, and a reply came. And while all this went on, the intercalary fifth month arrived.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke and would rise to be regent and chancellor. A long fast means a protracted period of abstinence and religious observance. This year carried an intercalary fifth month, so that there were two fifth months in it.
It is past the twentieth of the fifth month of the second year of Anna, and the place is the mountain temple where Kaneie was shut up.
It answers her poem saying that in this season of rain even a rare visitor lets the days fall past.
After this exchange the intercalary fifth month comes, and from the end of that month the author falls ill and writes what amounts to a will.
He takes back her verb for falling. The opening names water swollen by rain, producing the scene of the season and at the same time introducing, by sound, the word for still more in the second line; that hinge is the point of the poem. The second and third lines mean: if the days are to fall the more — carrying on her own word, which meant both raining and elapsing. The fourth means that since he will be soaked in any case it makes no difference. The verb at the close means to step down into water, and also to set about a thing in earnest, so that a resolve to push out through the rain is expressed entirely within the imagery of water. Shut up as he is, he cannot in fact stir; but by answering that if the passing of days is unbearable he may as well go out and be wet, he replies at once to his own earlier complaint of loneliness and to her charge about the interval. The whole is built from words belonging to water, and it makes good use of the setting of long rain at a mountain temple.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kaneie
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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.
- Leaving behind this world that blossoms and then turns to fruit, I shall be a drop of dew on a floating leaf, and so vanish away.
- If only the wind will not blow him toward some quarter he never wished for, then what befalls in this world I shall watch from the next.