みがくれのほどゝいふともあやめ草
なほしたからむ思ひあふやと
なほしたからむ思ひあふやと
- Roma-ji
-
Migakure no hodo to iu tomo ayamegusa nao shita karamu omoi au ya to
- English Translation
-
Though you may call it
a season of lying hidden
in the water, still
I would cut below the flag
and see whether hearts agree.
- Meaning
- Though you may call it a season of lying hidden in the water, I would still cut below the flag and see whether our hearts agree.
- Commentary
-
77 The Exchange with the Yamato-Seeming Woman: Hidden in the Water
The third month came. Michitsuna went on writing to the woman as before, but he was plainly unpracticed at it; and so the author herself sent the woman a poem, to find out whether she had any intention of marrying.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son, nineteen that year. The woman is the one the text calls the Yamato-seeming person, and she is unnamed. The wild rice of the poems is the plant of the water's edge, used also in the second book in the poem by which the author asked after Kaneie's whereabouts.
It is the third month of the first year of Tenen, and the places are the author's dwelling and the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
Michitsuna went on writing to the woman as before, but he was plainly unpracticed at it, and so the author herself sent this poem to find out whether the woman had any intention of marrying.
She answered with "Shita karamu hodo o mo shirazu makomogusa yo ni oisomeji hito wa karu tote mo."
The opening means hidden beneath the water, describing how the sweet flag roots below the surface, and carrying also the sense of keeping oneself out of sight; the woman's position, that nothing is yet in the open, is recast as a scene of water plants. The second is adversative: though you call it so. The third names the sweet flag, the plant at the center of this section's exchanges. The verb in the fourth means to cut below the flag, and its first element also brings in the sense of what lies at the bottom of a heart, so that the poem turns on it: cutting away what is hidden under the water becomes, unaltered, the act of finding out what the other truly intends. The close means: to see whether our hearts agree, and trails off. It is a scene in which a mother herself puts the question to the woman her son is courting, and the roundabout figure of cutting below a water plant keeps it from becoming a direct demand. Set beside the courtship scenes of the first book, where the household wrote the author's replies for her, the positions are reversed: here the mother composes on her son's behalf.
- Author
- The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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?
- Not even knowing when it is to be cut below, the wild rice will not come up into the world at all, though someone should cut for it.
- Let your heart be open, and let me hear it today at least — the cuckoo. The season has come round when it can be hidden no longer.