Kotowari ya iwade nagekishi toshitsuki mo furu no yashiro no kamisabinikemu

English Translation

You are right, of course.
The years I spent in grieving
and saying nothing
have gone as old and holy
as the shrine at Furu itself.

Meaning

You are quite right. The years I spent grieving and saying nothing have gone as old and holy as the shrine at Furu itself.

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.
No answer came to the poem about the white paper — she was out, he was told; and when the next day he asked for a reply, she said the poem had struck her as old-fashioned and that she would not answer. This was sent the day after that.
She answered that she was under abstinence for that day and the next. Early on the morning when he judged the abstinence to be over, Michitsuna sent "Yume bakari mite shi bakari ni madoitsutsu akuru zo osoki ama no tozashi wa."

The opening concedes the point — quite so — beginning by accepting the charge that his poem was old-fashioned. The second and third lines name the years he spent grieving without speaking; since in fact they were not many, the phrase is a deliberate exaggeration. The fourth names the shrine at Furu, in Isonokami in Yamato, whose name carries the word for growing old, and on it the poem turns: producing the place name brings in the sense of age of itself. The close means that it must have grown old and taken on the air of a god. He accepts the judgment that he is old-fashioned and pushes it further, turning it into a joke: if he is so old, then he must be venerable. Rather than deny the criticism he carries it forward, and one sees that he keeps his tone up even as the replies fail to come. Like the previous poem, it is made of a place name and a pivot word alone, and the charge of being old-fashioned may well have been aimed at just this manner of construction.

Author

Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other