Ajirogi ni kokoro o yosete hi o fureba amata no yo koso tabine shitekere

English Translation

Giving my heart to
the stakes of the fishing weir,
I let the days go —
and so I have spent night after
night, sleeping away from home.

Meaning

Giving my heart to the stakes of the fishing weir, I let the days go by — and so I have spent night after night sleeping away from home.

Commentary

39 Screen Poems for the Celebration of the Minister of the Left of Koichijō

The eighth month came. About that time the world was in an uproar over the celebration for the Minister of the Left of Koichijō. The Captain of the Left Gate Guards was to have the screens made, and by way of a connection that had no business asking for poems, the author was pressed to write. What one is given is a written list of the scenes painted on the screens. She sent it back again and again, saying the thing was hollow; but they insisted beyond all reason, and so in the evenings, in the intervals of moon-gazing, she thought out one or two at a time. What follows are the poems made for each of the painted scenes. Thus she was forced into a tiresome business, and into a great number of pieces besides; and of these, she hears, the one on the fishing fires and the one on the flock of plovers were the ones chosen.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Neither the Minister of the Left of Koichijō nor the Captain of the Left Gate Guards who arranged the celebration is named in the text, which gives only office and residence; marginal notes in the base text identify them as Fujiwara no Morotada and Fujiwara no Naritoki. A screen poem is written to accompany a scene painted on a screen, the poet being given a written description of the picture beforehand.
It is the eighth month of the second year of Anna, and the place is the author's dwelling.
It was written for a painting of a river weir.
Paintings of fishing fires and boats on the shore, and of a woman's carriage coming to a house rich in autumn leaves, follow, and with them the nine are complete.

The opening names the stakes driven into a river to make a weir, setting the painted weir at the door of the poem. The verb in the second line, used already in the poem on the pine grove, means both that water comes in against something and that a heart inclines toward it; since the stakes are what the current sets against, the phrase comes naturally. The third means letting the days pass. The fourth means many nights, its emphatic particle governing the close, which says that he has slept away from home night after night: caught by the sight of the weir, he has without noticing it lodged there again and again. In the first book, on the return from Hatsuse, the weirs appearing beneath the mist are called lovely beyond words, and the weir figures there too as something that halts a traveler on his road. To be so taken with a single feature of a landscape that one loses count of the days is an unusual note for a poem attached to a celebratory screen, and this piece puts the melancholy of a night away from home in the foreground.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other