Tsuyu ni nomi iro moenureba koto no ha o iku shio to ka wa shiru bekaruramu

English Translation

If it is only
the dew that has burned the color
in, then how am I
to know through how many dyings
these leaves of words have passed?

Meaning

If it is only the dew that has burned the color in, how am I to know through how many dyings these leaves of words have passed?

Commentary

71 The Cicadas; The Yamato-Seeming Woman: The Exchange on the Colored Leaves

The sixth month came. About the time when the cicadas were heard, Michitsuna sent the woman a poem, tied to a branch among which were colored leaves; and she answered it.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son. The woman is the one the text calls the Yamato-seeming person, and she is unnamed. The tree in question grows in the hills and its leaves may color while it is still summer, so that it figures in poetry as an out-of-season autumn foliage.
It is the sixth 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, sent with the colored leaves, saying that the color of his grief had burned through.
After this exchange, and passing over the grief at Bon and the warning of death, the eighth month goes by and the account moves to the exchange on white paper, concerning a hand of writing.

She takes back his dew, his color and his burning. The first two lines mean: if the color has been burned in by dew alone, the particle marking the limitation. He had said the leaves colored because the dew was deep; she sets that up again as a condition — if dew is the only cause. The word in the third line means words and also the leaves of a tree, so that the colored leaves he sent and the words he wrote are held in one term; on it the poem turns. The word in the fourth means the number of times a cloth is dipped in the dye, so that the line asks through how many dyings the leaves have passed. The more dippings, the deeper the color, and so the depth of words comes to be measured by a number of dyings. The close, governed by the rhetorical particle, means: how could she know? — she cannot. If dew alone gave them their color, there is no telling with how much feeling the words were dyed; she answers that she cannot judge the truth of his suit, and leaves room for the whole to be read as a refusal.

Source

Kagero Nikki

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