Sasagani no izuko to mo naku fuku kaze wa kakute amata ni nari zo surashi mo

English Translation

The spider's thread, in
a wind that blows from nowhere
one can name, seems now
to have been drawn out this way
into strand after strand.

Meaning

The spider's thread, in a wind that blows from nowhere one can name, seems to have been drawn out this way into strand after strand.

Commentary

90 Poems Written on the Paintings

The Master of the Right Stables kept summoning Michitsuna and would not let him go. Michitsuna brought home a beautiful painting from his house, showing a woman leaning against the fishing pavilion and gazing steadily at the pines on the island in the pond. The author composed a poem and pasted it to that picture. To another scene in the same painting — a man living alone, who has broken off in the middle of a letter and sits with his chin on his hand, lost in thought — she pasted a second poem. Michitsuna carried the painting with these poems on it back to the Master's house and left it there.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son. 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. Such paintings showed scenes of women's life, and writing poems on them to be sent was one of the amusements of the age.
It is the second year of Tenen, and the place is the author's dwelling.
In the painting Michitsuna brought home from the Master's house there was a man living alone who has broken off in the middle of a letter and sits with his chin on his hand, lost in thought; the author composed this and pasted it to that scene.
Michitsuna carried the painting with these poems on it back to the Master's house and left it there. Afterward come Kaneie's strange suspicions, and the author composes "Ima sara ni ikanaru koma ka natsuku beki susamenu kusa to nogare ni shi mi o."

The opening is the old poetic word for a spider and its thread, used throughout this diary since the first book as the figure for a slender and precarious line of communication. Attached to a picture of a man before an unfinished letter, it carries the sense of correspondence spun out as thin as thread. The second means: from no quarter one can name, and leads into the wind of the third — here again the thing that unsettles what one did not expect to be unsettled. The fourth means: in this way, pointing to the scene as painted. The close means that it seems to have parted into many strands, describing a web scattered by wind. The figure of a man sunk in thought over a letter he cannot finish is laid over a thread blown about, so that words which will not settle and scatter instead are given a shape. Where the previous poem read a waiting heart into a picture of a woman, this reads an unsettled one into a picture of a man, and the two make a matched pair. Since the painting with both poems was returned to the suitor's house, it amounts as well to setting the one who waits beside the one who wavers.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other