Hikitsuramu tamoto wa shirazu ayamegusa ayanaki sode ni kakezu mo aranamu

English Translation

Of the sleeve you say
you wetted, I know nothing.
Do not, I beg you,
hang the sweet flag upon a
sleeve that can make no sense of it.

Meaning

Of the sleeve you say you wetted I know nothing. Do not, I beg you, hang the sweet flag on a sleeve that can make no sense of it.

Commentary

69 The Sweet Flag Poems: The Consort's Daughter and the Yamato-Seeming Woman

The fifth month came. The author had sweet flag brought in, threaded it and made a scented ball, and gave it to Michitsuna to be presented to the young lady of that house, with a poem. Her mother sent an answer. Michitsuna prepared a second scented ball and sent it with a poem of his own to the woman he had been writing to, and she replied.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son, eighteen that year. Neither the young lady to whom the ball was presented nor her mother, who wrote the answer, is named in the text. The woman is the one the text calls the Yamato-seeming person, and she too is unnamed. The scented ball, hung up on the fifth day of the fifth month to drive off harm, is made of sweet flag and mugwort bound with threads.
It is the fifth month of the third year of Tenroku, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
It answers Michitsuna's poem, in which he asked her to hang the flag on her sleeve and dry it, since he had wetted his own in drawing it.
After this exchange, and passing over the prayer at Ishiyama, the account moves to the exchange on the colored leaves in the sixth month.

She takes back his drawing, his sleeve and his sweet flag. The opening means: you say you drew it, treating his account as hearsay. The second holds him off — she knows nothing of that sleeve — and declines to have anything to do with the story of the wetting. The third resets the gift and passes to the fourth, where the word means without pattern, making no sense; it is chosen for the sound it shares with the name of the flag. That echo between the plant's name and the word for what makes no sense is the hinge of the poem, so that the judgment that the whole business is unreasonable is drawn out of the name of the gift itself. The final particle expresses a wish directed at another: she would rather he did not hang it there. Though a refusal, it discards not one of his words but reassembles them all; as in the Mount Miwa exchange, she declines while keeping the form of the exchange intact.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other