かたしきし年はふれどもさごろもの
なみだにしむる時はなかりき
なみだにしむる時はなかりき
- Roma-ji
-
Katashikishi toshi wa furedomo sagoromo no namida ni shimuru toki wa nakariki
- English Translation
-
Year after year I
have lain on one spread sleeve alone;
but never once has
there been a time when tears soaked
through the robe I slept in.
- Meaning
- Year after year I have lain on one spread sleeve alone; but never once has there been a time when tears soaked through the robe.
- Commentary
-
101 The Twelfth Month: The Exchange Continues
The twelfth month came. The Assistant Master went on sending poems to the same woman. She said she was going out somewhere, and no answer came. The next day he sent to ask for a reply in words, and she wrote back only that she had seen it in the beech tree. He answered that, and she replied.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The Assistant Master is her son Fujiwara no Michitsuna. The woman is not named in the text. The tree in question grows in the hills and its leaves may color while it is still summer; its colored leaves were used in this pair's exchange in the sixth month as well.
It is the twelfth month of the second year of Tenen, and the place is the woman's house.
The twelfth month having come, the Assistant Master sent this to the same woman.
She said she was going out somewhere, and no answer came. The next day he sent to ask for a reply in words, and she wrote back only that she had seen it in the beech tree.
The opening names the spreading of one sleeve to sleep alone, the settled phrase for having no one beside one. The second is adversative — the years have passed so — and grants that sleeping alone is nothing new to him. The third names the robe, the garment to which that sleeve belongs. The fourth means that tears soak into it, the verb being the one used of a color or a scent sinking in. The close declares that such a time has never come before. Sleeping alone may be an old story, but the sleeve has never been wet with tears: by that he states that what he feels now is unlike anything before. The pairing of a single spread sleeve with tears has been used again and again by the author of this diary since the first book, so that the same pattern appears in her son's poem too; the difference is that his sets first the years in which the sleeve stayed dry, and so sharpens the contrast with the present.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Michitsuna
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- You tread it — you read it — and still, not knowing how perilous a thing a bridge of cloud can be, you go on counting upon it.
- Still I would cross; and that heart of mine is a stout one. Has the reed-crane no wings with which to come down along the cloud-paths of the sky?
- Between us it has come to this — enough, I think, to wet the beech tree: that even in the two words "I saw it" a coldness shows.
- Being a far pine on a mountain wrapped in the clouds of heaven, the color that wets beside it is evergreen, unchanging.