Kata toki ni kaeshi yokazu o kazoureba shigi no moroha mo tayushi to zo naku

English Translation

Counting up the nights
you turned away in a moment,
I find the snipe cries
that even both its wings have
grown weary with the reckoning.

Meaning

Counting up the nights you turned away in a moment, I find the snipe crying that even both its wings have grown weary with the reckoning.

Commentary

66 Exchange with Kaneie: The Snipe's Wing-Beating

On the sixteenth of the intercalary second month Kaneie called and went straight home again, and for some nine days afterward there was no word. Unusually, it was the author who sent a poem to him. Kaneie answered it.
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 snipe's wing-beating is the bird's habit of drawing its bill through its feathers, said to be repeated many times at dawn, and it serves as a figure for counting the nights of waiting.
It is the intercalary second month of the third year of Tenroku, some nine days after Kaneie's visits had ceased, and the place is the author's dwelling.
He had called on the sixteenth of the intercalary second month and gone straight home again, and for some nine days there was no word. Unusually, the author was the one to send a poem.
Kaneie answered with "Ikanare ya shigi no hanegaki kaki shirazu omou kai naki koe ni nakuramu."

The opening means within the briefest interval, referring to a visit that ended almost as soon as it began. The second names the nights thus sent away, and leads into the counting. The third means: when one counts them. The fourth names both the snipe's wings; the bird was said to draw its bill through its feathers again and again at dawn, and counting those strokes had long served in poetry as a figure for counting the nights of waiting. The verb at the close means both to cry as a bird and to weep, and the emphatic particle deepens the lament. To say that in the course of the reckoning even the snipe's wings grow weary and it cries is to show how many the nights of waiting have become. The whole is built on the act of counting, which brings the number of nights and the number of wing-strokes together; and since the narrative remarks how unusual it was, in the third book, for the author to be the one who wrote, the care taken over the poem answers to that unusualness.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other