Nao shinobe hanatachibana no eda ya naki aoi suginuru uzuki naredomo

English Translation

Wait, and endure it
still. It is not that there is
no orange branch left;
only that the hollyhock day
of meeting is past this month.

Meaning

Wait, and endure it still: it is not that there is no orange branch left; only that the hollyhock day of meeting is past, this fourth month.

Commentary

88 The Exchange over the Promise of the Fourth Month

The fourth month came. The Master of the Right Stables called again and again to press his suit, and asking for inkstone and paper he wrote a poem urging that something be settled within the month. The author answered it.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The Master of the Right Stables was a younger brother of Kaneie; the text gives only his office, and a marginal note in the base text identifies him as Fujiwara no Tōdo. The cuckoo sings at the beginning of summer and is awaited in the fourth month. The flowering orange is the flower that calls up the past, and belongs with the cuckoo.
It is the fourth month of the second year of Tenen, and the place is the author's dwelling.
It answers the Master of the Right Stables, who had pressed that something be settled within the month.
After this exchange he comes on the night of the twenty-second, the appointed day, and begs to be let inside the blinds.

She takes up his cuckoo and his fourth month. The verb in the opening means to endure, and also to call the past to mind. The second names the flowering orange, the flower that recalls what is gone and the branch on which the cuckoo is said to sing, so that it follows naturally from the bird in his poem. The third means that such a branch is not lacking — that there is still something to wait on. The word in the fourth is the hollyhock and also the day of meeting, and on it the poem turns: since the Kamo festival falls in the fourth month, a fourth month in which the hollyhock is over makes sense as a season, and carries at the same time the sense that the day of meeting is past. The close is adversative and trails off, leaving what should follow unsaid. To a man pressing a deadline she says that the day of meeting has gone by, and yet adds that he should endure — so that the reply is neither a refusal nor a postponement. The play on hollyhock and meeting appears also in the first poem Michitsuna ever sent, so that mother and son use the same word.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other