Kumo no kaku ito zo ayashiki kaze fukeba sora ni midaruru mono to shirushiru

English Translation

How strange a thing is
the thread the spider draws — and
writes — knowing all the
while that when the wind blows it
will be scattered on the air.

Meaning

How strange a thing is the thread the spider draws — and writes — knowing all the while that when the wind blows it will be scattered on the air.

Commentary

72 Grief at the Bon Festival; The Yamato-Seeming Woman: The Exchange on White Paper

There was grief about the time of the Bon festival, and then a warning of death, after which she kept silence for a time. When the eighth month too had passed, Michitsuna, unable to believe that any of the woman's answers were in her own hand, sent her a poem in reproach. She answered on white paper, and he wrote again. From then on, whenever no answer came, he sent another poem.
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. At that period a woman's replies were often written for her by an attendant, so that whether a letter was in her own hand served as a measure of what she felt.
It is after the eighth month of the third year of Tenroku had passed, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
It answers Michitsuna's reproach that her replies were not in her own hand, and was written on white paper.
He wrote again with "Tsuyu ni te mo inochi kaketaru kumo no i ni araki kaze o ba tare ka fusegamu."

She takes back his spider and his verb. The word in the opening means both to string a thread and to write, so that she keeps to the device he had used. The word in the second line means the spider's thread and also serves as the adverb for very, and on it the poem turns: the thread itself is strange, and it is very strange, at once. The third means: when the wind blows. The fourth means scattered in the air, describing a web that loses its shape in the wind. The close means: knowing it all the while. Over the image of a spider that goes on spinning although it knows the wind will undo the work, she lays the frailty of the act of writing an answer at all; to a man who asks whose hand the letters are in, she replies that the writing itself is uncertain from the start. The narrative's remark that she wrote on white paper is what the next poem takes up as a white beach.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other