さもこそは葛城山になれたらめ
唯ひとことやかぎりなりける
唯ひとことやかぎりなりける
- Roma-ji
-
Samo koso wa katsuragiyama ni naretarame tada hitokoto ya kagiri narikeru
- English Translation
-
No doubt you have grown
quite familiar with the ways
of Katsuragi:
was it then a single word,
and that the end of the matter?
- Meaning
- No doubt you have grown quite familiar with the ways of Katsuragi. Was it a single word, then, and that the end of the matter?
- 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.
Even the poem sent on the morning after the abstinence brought no reply; she put him off with one excuse and another, and so he sent this.
After this series, and passing over her state of mind while painting and the death of the Chancellor, the year turns, and the account moves to the exchange on the red plum in the second month of the first year of Tenen.
The opening concedes the point with a touch of irony: no doubt it is so. The second names Mount Katsuragi in Yamato, where a god was said to dwell who spoke only a single word, and that tradition is the ground of the poem. The third means that she must have grown familiar with him, bound by an emphatic particle — a hit at her having taken after the god of the one word. The fourth means: only a single word, with an interrogative particle. The close asks whether that was the end of it. Having had one reply and nothing since but excuses, he reproaches her by way of a god who says one word only. The god is never named; the mountain alone is set down and the tradition comes with it, which is deftly done, so that the reproach never becomes insistent. Placed last in the series that began with the white paper, it completes seven poems in which Michitsuna writes on and on alone.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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.
- Having seen you for no more than the space of a dream, I go on lost; and slow indeed it is to open — the gate of heaven.
- Thinking how the years have gone by and come to nothing, I gaze — and find that even my sleeves have taken the color of these flowers.
- After all these years, why should you have stood there so absently, beside the flowers, and let yourself be cut and dyed their color?