Sasa wakeba are koso masame kusagare no koma natsuku beki mori no shita ka wa

English Translation

Push through the bamboo
grass and the wildness only
grows the greater. Is
this a grove beneath which a
horse could ever be made tame?

Meaning

If one pushes through the bamboo grass, the wildness will only increase. Is this a grove beneath which a horse could ever be tamed?

Commentary

98 The Exchange with the Lord of Horikawa

The tenth month came. Past the twentieth, while she was staying at a house to which she had moved to avoid an unlucky direction, she heard that a child had been born at that other house. One evening a man who seemed to be her brother crept close and drew from his breast a letter folded and knotted in Michinoku paper, thrust into a stalk of withered plume grass. She asked whose it was, and he said only that she should look. Opening it and reading by the lamp, she found the hand very like that of a person she thought of with no pleasure. What was written was: what of that line about what sort of horse? — and a poem. Since those were the very words she had once sent and afterward regretted, it was very strange. Asking whose it was, and whether it came from the Lord of Horikawa, she was told that it was a letter from the Great Minister; that his escort had brought it to the house, had been told he was not there, and had left it all the same. However could he have heard of it, she wondered, turning it over and over. When she consulted the household, an old-fashioned person overheard and said in alarm that it was a great honor, that she must answer at once, and that the escort should be given something. Well then, she thought, he cannot have meant it slightingly; and yet it was carelessly done. So she answered.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The one whom the text calls the Great Minister, or the Lord of Horikawa, was Kaneie's elder brother and stood at that time at the head of government; the text gives no name. The other house is the one Kaneie frequented. The old-fashioned person is the author's father, Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michinoku paper is a thick paper of good quality.
It is past the twentieth of the tenth month of the second year of Tenen, and the place is the house to which she had moved to avoid an unlucky direction.
It answers the poem saying that the kinship of frost-withered grass moved him and that he would tame the horse when the grass greened again. Pressed by her father, who was alarmed and said she must answer at once, she composed it while thinking the whole thing carelessly done.
The narrative adds that she heard, long afterward and with amusement, that a certain person had begun another poem in reply to this one and was saying that the last lines were not yet finished.

She takes back his withered grass and his horse. The opening means: if one pushes through the bamboo grass, beginning from a word that suggests a wild place no one has trodden. The second, bound by an emphatic particle, declares that the wildness will only increase: to push in would not make a path but make the place wilder still, and so she gently turns aside a man proposing to come. The third resets his frost-withered grass. The fourth takes up his wish to tame a horse and sets it as a condition. The close is rhetorical: is it such a grove? — it is not. A sacred grove is a stand of trees where a god dwells, not a place people may enter as they please, and so it is no place where a horse could be tamed. Having reassembled every one of his words, she states her refusal twice over, by the wildness and by the rhetorical question — a reply that carries her meaning without any discourtesy to a man of the highest rank.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other