Nagarete no toko to tanomite koshikadomo waga nakagawa wa asenikerashi mo

English Translation

I came here trusting
it for a bed that would keep
flowing on always;
but this Nakagawa of mine
has run shallow, it seems, and faded.

Meaning

I came here trusting it for a bed that would go on flowing always; but this Nakagawa of mine has run shallow, it seems, and faded.

Commentary

80 The Move to Nakagawa

Toward the end of the eighth month the author moved to Hirohata no Nakagawa without telling Kaneie. On a morning in the ninth month, seeing the river mist lying both within the house and without, she was moved to sadness and composed this poem.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Hirohata no Nakagawa takes its name from a stream on the eastern side of the capital, near which she now lived. Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke and would rise to be regent and chancellor.
It is a morning in the ninth month of the first year of Tenen, and the place is the author's new house at Hirohata no Nakagawa.
Toward the end of the eighth month she had moved there without telling Kaneie. On a morning in the ninth month, seeing the river mist lying both within the house and without, she was moved to sadness and composed this.
It was sent to no one and stayed within her. What follows is an account of life at Nakagawa as the season of the rice harvest comes on.

The opening means flowing on and on, of water that never stops. The word in the second line means the bed of a river, and it also carries the words for what is constant and for a sleeping place; on it the poem turns. The image of trusting to a riverbed that never ceases to run becomes the trusting of a bond that does not change, and with the further sense of a bed the marriage itself is named. The third is adversative — she came trusting so, and yet — and passes to the second half. The fourth names the place to which she has moved, but the first element of the name is also the word for the tie between two people, so that her Nakagawa is her own marriage. The verb at the close means both that water grows shallow and that a color fades, so that a river run low carries the sense of an attachment worn thin. The name of the new place becomes the hinge of the poem; and since she moved without telling him, it is also a poem in which she takes the measure of the silence herself.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other