Uguisu mo go mo naki mono ya omouramu minazuki hatenu ne o zo naku naru

English Translation

Does the warbler too
brood on something with no term
set to it? I hear
it crying with a voice that,
in this sixth month, is not spent.

Meaning

Does the warbler too brood on something with no term set to it? I hear it crying, in this sixth month, with a voice not yet spent.

Commentary

43 Lamenting the Length of the Interval in the Sixth Month

As the days went by, at the end of that month it was announced that the Minister of Ono no Miya had died; the world was in disorder, he said, and out of observance he could not come. He sent word that he was now in mourning dress and that these things should be made up quickly. It was too much, and she sent back word that the women who had been sewing had been sent home to their families. After that his manner was more galling still, and there was no message at all. So the sixth month came. Counting it up, it was more than thirty days since he had spent a night with her, and more than forty since she had seen him by day. It had come on so suddenly that to call it strange was not enough. Theirs was not a marriage that had ever gone as she wished, and yet she had never met with anything like this, so that those about her too thought it odd and unheard of. She could think of nothing and only sat brooding. Ashamed to be seen, she hid the tears as they fell, and lying there she heard a warbler drawing out its cry; and the poem came to her at the sound.
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. The Minister of Ono no Miya is named in the text only by residence and office; a marginal note in the base text identifies him as Fujiwara no Saneyori.
It is the sixth month of the first year of Tenroku, and the place is the author's dwelling.
It was more than thirty days since he had spent a night with her, and more than forty since she had seen him by day. She could think of nothing, was ashamed to be seen, and lay hiding the tears as they fell, when she heard a warbler drawing out its cry; the poem came to her at the sound.
It was sent to no one and stayed within her. Afterward she set out for Karasaki, thinking to ease her mind and perform a purification.

The particle in the opening carries the sense of like myself, drawing the bird over to her own side. The word in the second line means an appointed end, so that the brooding is one with no term to it. The same word served in the snow poem, and it binds a self with no season for melting to a grief with no season for ending. The third line conjectures: is it so with the bird as well? The word in the fourth is the name of the sixth month and also the phrase for all being spent, and the poem turns on it. The warbler is a bird of spring, so that to hear one in the sixth month is itself out of season, and that irregularity answers the irregular interval of thirty and forty days. The close is bound by an emphatic particle, and its reportative ending shows a woman lying down and hearing nothing but a voice. That the whole poem is built from a sound, with nothing seen at all, tells much about her condition in this period.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other