いかなれやしぎのはねがきかき知らず
思ふかひなき聲に鳴くらむ
思ふかひなき聲に鳴くらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Ikanare ya shigi no hanegaki kaki shirazu omou kai naki koe ni nakuramu
- English Translation
-
How can it be? The
snipe, not knowing the count of
its own wing-strokes, cries
out in a voice for which all
that thinking was to no purpose.
- Meaning
- How can it be? The snipe, not knowing the count of its own wing-strokes, cries in a voice for which all that thinking was to no purpose.
- 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, and the place is Kaneie's residence.
It answers the author's poem, which had reckoned up the nine days of silence by the figure of the snipe's wing-beating.
After this exchange, and passing over the festival at Hachiman and the fire next door, the account moves on to the Mount Miwa exchange in the fourth month.
He takes back her snipe and its wing-beating. The opening asks how it can be, adopting from the first the posture of one who finds her complaint puzzling. In the second and third lines the word for beating belongs to the wing-stroke and also carries the sense of scratching up a tally, so that the phrase means: without knowing the count of them. Where she had said she counted, he replies that the bird knows no numbers at all, and so lets the matter pass. The fourth means to no purpose for all one's thinking, and applies that description to the bird's cry. The close conjectures that it must cry with such a voice. To a woman who has reckoned up the nights he substitutes a bird that cries without knowing any reckoning, and never answers the question of the interval itself. Since the first book Kaneie's replies have consistently taken up every one of the other's words while shifting their sense, and the pattern is kept here.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Kaneie
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- These sleeves, that night by night have been wet with the dew that settles and settles — are they sleeves that would dry, even in the midst of such a fire?
- 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.
- I have begun to love, and to be full of thought; and from this day on, will the hollyhock day of meeting be far off from me?
- Past all reason my heart has grown and stood up, tall as a cedar — since I first came seeking the foot of the mountain called Miwa.