Toshitsuki no meguri kuruma no wa ni narite omoeba kakaru ori mo arikeri

English Translation

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.

Meaning

The years and months come round, and have become the wheel of a carriage; and looking back, I find there have been such moments as this.

Commentary

97 The Poem on the Carriage Wheel

In the eighth month smallpox broke out and reached this neighborhood, and the Assistant Master fell gravely ill. On the first of the ninth month he recovered. On the day he first went out again, his carriage met on the road the carriage of the household he had been writing to; somehow the shaft caught and there was trouble. The next day a poem came from there, with word that she had known nothing of it the night before. He took the letter in, read it, wrote a few words in an ordinary hand along its edge, and sent it back with repeated protestations of his own. The author remarks that this too might pass.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The Assistant Master is her son Fujiwara no Michitsuna, appointed Assistant Master of the Right Stables that year. The woman of the household he wrote to is not named in the text. The smallpox of that year is recorded in the diary as having carried off both sons of the Chancellor of Ichijō.
It is the ninth month of the second year of Tenen, and the places are a road in the capital and the author's dwelling.
On the day Michitsuna first went out after his recovery, his carriage met hers on the road and the shaft caught. The next day this poem came from her, with word that she had known nothing of it.
He took the letter in, wrote in an ordinary hand along its edge, and sent it back with repeated protestations of his own.

The opening sets the passage of time and hands on to the second line, where the word for carriage means also the interval in which time comes round; on it the poem turns, so that the plain fact that they met in carriages becomes the very word for the turning of the years. The third line names the wheel of a carriage: a wheel goes round and round in the same circle, and so shows how the years return upon themselves. The fourth looks back, and the close states as a discovery that there have been such moments as this. A chance event — two carriages meeting and their wheels touching — is taken as proof that the turning of the years brings such occasions about, and the poem moves in a single word from a concrete object to the abstraction of time. Among the poems by others that the diary records, this one is notable for the quickness with which an accident on the road is made the occasion of a verse.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other