七夕の門渡る舟のかぢの葉に
いく秋書きつ露の玉章
いく秋書きつ露の玉章
- Roma-ji
-
Tanabata no to wataru fune no kaji no ha ni iku aki kakitsu tsuyu no tamazusa
- English Translation
-
On the mulberry
leaves of the boat that crosses
over to her, how
many autumns have written
letters of dew there, I ask
- Meaning
- On the paper-mulberry leaves, and on the oar of the boat that crosses to the Weaver, how many autumns have written their letters of dew?
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 320
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, a Tanabata poem.
The eighth poem on Tanabata, turning on the custom of writing a poem on a mulberry leaf, and asking how many years have been written there. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei; this is his fourth appearance in this book, after the two hundred and ninety-first, three hundred and first and three hundred and fifth poems.
The time is the night of the seventh day of the seventh month; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
At the festival poems were written on paper-mulberry leaves and offered, and the poem rests on that practice.
The first line names the Weaver.
The second line repeats the phrase of Akahito's three hundred and fourteenth poem, so that two poems share the boat at the crossing and bind this book's Tanabata run together.
The word in the third line means the oar of a boat and at the same time the paper-mulberry tree whose leaves were written on. It turns from a word belonging to boats into a word belonging to leaves, and in that one word a boat in heaven meets a custom on earth.
The fourth line asks how many autumns have been written there; a perfect auxiliary shows that it has been done year after year.
The poem closes on a noun meaning a letter, with an honorific first element. The dew lying on the leaf is taken for the writing itself. The dew that has recurred through this book since the two hundred and ninety-fourth poem appears here as script, and its handling is turned.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- On the Weaver's night the robes of heaven are laid one on the other and where they sleep it is cool for the autumn wind is up
- The hems of the robes of the Weaver: have a care and do not blow them back and turn them inside out you first wind of the autumn
- When I gaze at it my sleeves are cool: the river bed of heaven, far in the sky, and the evening that is falling in autumn
- How it must go through and pierce them, on the evening when the Weaver waits for her lord, the wind that blows along heaven's river there