Shita karamu hodo o mo shirazu makomogusa yo ni oisomeji hito wa karu tote mo

English Translation

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.

Meaning

Not even knowing when it is to be cut below, the wild rice will never come up into the world, though someone should cut for it.

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 place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
It answers the author's poem, which proposed to cut below the sweet flag and learn what she intended.
After this exchange, and passing over a fire nearby, the account moves to the exchanges on the cuckoo and the sweet flag in the fifth month.

She takes back the other's cutting below. The opening restates that phrase — the time when it is cut below. The second means: not knowing even that, describing a plant unaware that any such time will come. The third names the wild rice of the water's edge, exchanging the other's sweet flag for a different water plant. That same plant served in the second book, in the author's own poem asking where Kaneie had gone, "Soko ni sae karu to iu naru makomogusa ikanaru sawa ni ne o todomuramu," so that the habit of entrusting a person's condition to a water plant is at work here too. The fourth means that it will never begin to grow up into the world, its auxiliary carrying a firm refusal. The close means: even though someone should cut, and the verb for cutting sounds against the verb for growing distant. To say that a plant which does not know when it may be cut will never come up into the world is a roundabout way of answering that she has no intention of marrying. To a proposal to cut below and find out, she replies from the position of the plant that would be cut, and the whole is kept within the vocabulary of water plants.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other