わりなくもすぎ立ちにける心かな
三輪の山もとたづねはじめて
三輪の山もとたづねはじめて
- Roma-ji
-
Warinaku mo sugi tachinikeru kokoro kana miwa no yamamoto tazune hajimete
- English Translation
-
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.
- Meaning
- Past all reason my heart has grown and stood up tall, since I first came seeking the foot of Mount Miwa.
- Commentary
-
68 The Yamato-Seeming Woman: The Exchange on Mount Miwa
One day in the fourth month she took Michitsuna with her to Chisokuin. On the way back they saw a lady's carriage of some distinction; Michitsuna followed it and traced it to a house at the foot of Mount Miwa. The next day he sent the lady a poem. She said she had no idea what it meant, but he sent another, and she answered.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son, eighteen that year. The text calls the woman only the Yamato-seeming person and gives no name. Mount Miwa is a poetic place in Yamato, known from the old poem in which a cedar marks the house one is to visit.
It is the fourth month of the third year of Tenroku, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
The woman had answered his first poem by saying she had no idea what it meant, and he sent this one after it all the same.
She replied with "Miwa no yama machi miru koto no yuyushisa ni sugi tateri to mo e koso shirasene."
The opening means beyond reason, past what is proper, and sets an ungovernable heart at the front. The word in the second line means to exceed and also names the cedar of Mount Miwa, and on it the poem turns; the verb likewise serves both for a heart rising up and for a tree standing. The third line closes on an exclamation and passes to the fourth. Mount Miwa is a poetic place in Yamato, known from the old poem in which the speaker tells a lover that if she longs for him she should come to the foot of Miwa and look for the gate with a cedar standing by it. That the woman's house stood at the foot of Miwa is what calls up that poem. The close means: having begun to seek, and trails off. Told that she did not know what he meant, he answers with a place name and an old poem, showing that he knows perfectly well which house is meant — a step further than his first.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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.
- 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?
- To wait and look for you at Miwa would be an ill-omened thing; so, even if a cedar stands there, I cannot let you know of it.
- In the hidden marsh it began to grow, the sweet flag — and with no one to know of it, these roots that reach down so deep, so deep below.