さごろものつまも結ばぬ玉の緖の
絕えみ絕えずみ世をや結ばむ
絕えみ絕えずみ世をや結ばむ
- Roma-ji
-
Sagoromo no tsuma mo musubanu tama no o no taemi taezumi yo o ya musubamu
- English Translation
-
The hem of the robe
is left unknotted; and like
a jewel's slender cord
that breaks and does not break, shall
we knot a life together?
- Meaning
- The hem of the robe is left unknotted; and like a jewel's cord that breaks and does not break, shall we knot a life together?
- Commentary
-
81 Poems Sent into the Silence
In the ninth month the rice was being cut in the fields around the house. Michitsuna went on writing to the woman as before, and sent her a poem. No answer came. After a while he sent another.
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. Since the move to Nakagawa, the household has lived with fields on every side.
It is the ninth month of the first year of Tenen, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
After the move to Nakagawa, as the season of the rice harvest came on, Michitsuna went on writing to the woman, and sent this poem among his letters.
No answer came. After a while he sent "Tsuyu fukaki sode ni hietsutsu akasu kana tare nagaki yo no kataki naruramu."
The opening names the robe by an elevated term. The word in the second line means the hem of a garment, but from the sense of an edge it also sounds the word for a wife, and joined to the verb for knotting it produces the sense of a bond not made. There was a custom of knotting the hem of a robe before a journey, so that to leave it unknotted is to fail to bind a tie. The third names the cord on which jewels are strung, the standing figure for a frail life. The fourth means breaking and not breaking, describing a cord always about to part and never parting — which is the manner in which the connection between them continues. The verb at the close takes up again the knotting of the first line, and means both to tie a cord and to make a bond. Beginning from a hem left unknotted, passing through the breaking and not breaking, and ending by asking whether they shall knot a life after all, the poem is built throughout on that one verb. It is a poem telling a woman who does not answer that he means to go on.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- Since it seems the wind sets its heart inward only, toward your own side, the one that blows back in reply will surely prove the weaker.
- 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.
- On sleeves heavy with dew I lie growing colder, and so pass the night. Who, I wonder, is the enemy that makes the long night long?
- The season of being shut in, of losing my way in snow, is over; and today, at last, I come seeking the plum at your hedge.