かげにしもなどか鳴くらむ卯の花の
えだにしのぶの心とぞ聞く
えだにしのぶの心とぞ聞く
- Roma-ji
-
Kage ni shimo nadoka nakuramu u no hana no eda ni shinobu no kokoro to zo kiku
- English Translation
-
Why should it cry there
of all places, in the shade?
I have always heard
that the branch of the deutzia
has a heart that hides things well.
- Meaning
- Why should it cry there of all places, in the shade? I have always heard that the deutzia's branch has a heart that hides things well.
- Commentary
-
95 The Exchange on the Deutzia Flowers
A letter came from the Master of the Right Stables about the letter she had shown him; she answered it, and he sent a poem in reply. Wondering why he should take it all so hard, the author answered him.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The Master of the Right Stables was Kaneie's younger brother; the text gives only his office and no name. The deutzia flowers white in the fourth and fifth months, and in poetry the cuckoo is said to sing in their shade.
It is the fifth 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 written that the cuckoo went on crying in the shade of the deutzia; wondering why he should take it all so hard, she replied.
After this exchange the affair ends unexpectedly, with the Master of the Right Stables carrying off the woman who had been his wife before.
She takes back his shade, his crying and his deutzia. The opening means: in the shade of all places, its particle sharpening the restriction, so that the line asks why he should choose to cry where no one can see. The second asks why it cries at all, finding his display of grief odd — exactly as the narrative says, that she wondered why he should take it so hard. The third resets his flower and passes to the fourth, where the verb means both to endure and to keep out of sight: she has heard, she says, that the deutzia's branch has a heart that hides. By putting the hiding on the side of the branch, she makes the argument that there is no need to cry out of sight, since the branch itself does the hiding. The close is bound by an emphatic particle: so she has heard. She neither dismisses his grief nor accepts it, but suggests that there is no call to weep in hiding — a reply that keeps its distance from a man who is courting her household.
- Author
- The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- If the shallows where we do not meet are dear to you, then let me live beside that Nakagawa where those who love pass and repass.
- Sighing, I pass the nights and days; and the cuckoo goes on crying, crying there in the shadow of these white deutzia flowers.
- The years and months come round, and have become the wheel of a carriage; and looking back, I find there have been such moments even as this.
- The kinship of the grass withered by frost is what moves me; and when it greens again — the horse returning — I would have that horse grow tame.