年を経て住むべき宿の池水は
星合の影も面馴れやせん
星合の影も面馴れやせん
- Roma-ji
-
Toshi o hete sumubeki yado no ikemizu wa hoshiai no kage mo omonare ya semu
- English Translation
-
Year upon year now
in the pond of the garden
where I mean to live
will the faces of the stars
grow familiar, meeting there
- Meaning
- Will the water of the pond at the house where I am to live out my years grow used to the reflection of the meeting stars?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 315
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The third poem on Tanabata. The stars are reflected in a pond, and the poem asks whether, with the years, the reflection will become a familiar sight. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Nagaie (1005-1064), a son of Fujiwara no Michinaga and founder of the Mikohidari house, from which Shunzei and Teika descend. In Book Two he is the poet of the hundred and third poem.
The time is the night of the seventh day of the seventh month; the place is a pond at the poet's house.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
At the festival it was customary to look at the stars reflected in a pond or a basin, and the two poems that follow turn on the same practice.
The auxiliary in the second line expresses what is to be: a house he is to live in for years to come. Length of time is set down first.
The third line names the water that will hold the reflection.
The fourth line names the meeting of the two stars, and the word for their image means light and also a shape shown in water.
The verb at the close means to grow used to the sight of something; its first element means a face, and here it also sounds the surface of the water. An interrogative particle follows. Though the meeting comes once a year, with the years it may become an ordinary sight in this pond: a rare event in heaven is drawn into the daily life of a garden.
The two poems before this took the distance between sky and earth for their subject; this one joins them through a reflecting surface, and several poems that follow take up the same device.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Nagaie
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- I too gaze up at the wide sky, and even on the night when he waits the Herdsman, for his lady must I sleep here all alone
- The rain that came down this evening: is it the drops off the Herdsman's oar as he brings his boat across the crossing of the river
- My sleeve gets soaking and in the water I hold cupped in my own hands I am looking at the sky where the stars of heaven meet
- Through a break in cloud I look out at the wide sky where the two stars meet and the waves of the river of heaven will not lie still