白妙のころもは神にゆづりてむ
へだてぬ中にかへしなすべく
へだてぬ中にかへしなすべく
- Roma-ji
-
Shirotae no koromo wa kami ni yuzuritemu hedatenu naka ni kaeshi nasu beku
- English Translation
-
This white robe I shall
make over to the goddess,
that she may turn it —
and turn us back again to
a bond with nothing between.
- Meaning
- This white robe I shall make over to the goddess, that she may turn it — and turn us back to a bond with nothing between.
- Commentary
-
92 Offering Robes to the Goddess
In the fifth month, as she was setting out on a pilgrimage, one of her women said that for a goddess it was best to sew robes and offer them. So the author cut three little garments for paper figures out of close-woven silk, and wrote a poem on the inner panel of each.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The silk named is a fine, closely woven kind. The figures are the small paper effigies offered to a god in a person's stead, and she sewed garments to clothe them. The text does not say which shrine she was going to.
It is the fifth month of the second year of Tenen, and the place is the shrine to which she was going.
As she was setting out, one of her women said that for a goddess it was best to sew robes and offer them; so she cut three little garments for paper figures out of close-woven silk, and this is the first of the three poems written on the inner panel of each.
The second is "Karagoromo nareni shi tsuma o uchikaeshi waga shitagai ni nasu yoshi mo gana," and the third "Natsugoromo tatsu ya to zo miru chihayaburu kami o hitoe ni tanomu mi nareba."
The opening names white cloth, the color proper to a robe offered to a god. The second and third lines say that the robe is being made over to the goddess. The verb for making over carries the sense of giving up what is one's own and putting it in another's hands, which suits the act of clothing a substitute figure and offering it. The fourth names a bond with nothing between, that is, an intimacy, and states the substance of the prayer. The verb at the close means to put a thing back as it was and also to turn a garment inside out, and on it the poem turns: placed in a scene of sewing, the practical business of turning cloth and restitching it is laid over the wish that a marriage be restored. Though it is in effect a petition, it confines its material to a robe and states the prayer entirely in the vocabulary of clothing — the common construction of all three poems, of which this is the first. Where the poems offered at Inari and Kamo in the first book asked for a sign in the language of the shrines' own scenery, here the material of the poem is the offering itself.
- Author
- The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- 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.
- What horse, at this late day, would ever come to me? I am the grass that no horse will touch, and a self that cannot get away from it.
- This Chinese robe, whose hem I have worn soft with years — if only I could turn it, and make of that hem the under panel of my own.
- A summer robe, and I see it being cut — for I am one who trusts the gods, mighty gods, with a single heart, as this robe is single.