時鳥かくれなき音を聞かせては
かけはなれぬる身とやなるらむ
かけはなれぬる身とやなるらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Hototogisu kakure naki ne o kikasete wa kakehanarenuru mi to ya naruramu
- English Translation
-
If the cuckoo lets
its voice be heard where nothing
hides it, must I then
become one who is carried
far off, and set apart from you?
- Meaning
- If the cuckoo lets its voice be heard where nothing hides it, must I then become one set far apart from you?
- Commentary
-
78 The Fifth Month: Exchanges on the Cuckoo and the Sweet Flag
The fifth month came. Michitsuna sent the woman a poem on the cuckoo, and she answered it. Then on the fifth day of the fifth month, the festival of the sweet flag, he sent another on that plant, and again she answered.
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 fifth day of the fifth month is the festival at which sweet flag is hung under the eaves and scented balls are put up.
It is the fifth month of the first year of Tenen, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
It answers Michitsuna's poem saying that the season had come when it could be hidden no longer.
After this exchange, on the fifth day of the fifth month, he sent "Mono omou ni toshi henikeri tote ayamegusa kyō o tabitabi sugushite zo shiru."
She takes back his cuckoo and his hiding. The opening resets his bird and passes to the second line, a voice that nothing conceals — that is, no muffled call but a full one. Where he said he could hide it no longer, she receives that as a voice which cannot be hidden. The word for that voice also sounds the word for a plant's root, which supports the idea of something hidden coming into the open. The third means: once it has been let be heard. The fourth means carried far away. The close conjectures whether she must become such a person, and ends on the question. The argument is that once the voice is no longer muffled it will be known, and once known they must be parted; so that where he made the season his pretext for bringing his feeling out, she answers that bringing it out will only separate them. She refuses, and yet leaves standing the suggestion that she does not wish to be parted — a softer note than any of her earlier replies.
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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.
- That the years have gone by while I brooded — I learn it now, having let this day, the day of the sweet flag, come round and pass, and pass again.
- The pattern of these piled-up years is past my telling; for I can see the heart that lets even this day go by, and pass, like the rest.