七夕は今や別るる天の河
河霧立ちて千鳥鳴くなり
河霧立ちて千鳥鳴くなり
- Roma-ji
-
Tanabata wa ima ya wakaruru ama no kawa kawagiri tachite chidori naku nari
- English Translation
-
Are they parting now
the two of them, and mist rolls
up from the river
of heaven, and the plovers
can be heard, crying somewhere
- Meaning
- Is the Weaver parting from him now? Mist is rising from the River of Heaven, and plovers seem to be calling.
- Commentary
-
Book Four Autumn Poems I 327
Headnote: for a screen at the residence of the Middle Counsellor Kanesuke.
This poem closes the run on Tanabata. The moment of parting is reasoned out from river mist and plovers, both features of the world below. The headnote assigns it to a screen at Kanesuke's house.
This is Tsurayuki's second appearance in this book, after the three hundred and thirteenth poem. Fujiwara no Kanesuke (877-933), whose screen it was, rose to Middle Counsellor and was called the Embankment Counsellor from his house on the bank of the Kamo River. He was the great-grandfather of Murasaki Shikibu, and a poem by him appears in Book Nine, at the eight hundred and sixty-second.
The time is daybreak on the eighth day of the seventh month; the place is in heaven.
The occasion was the screen.
The first line names the Weaver.
An interrogative particle in the second line asks whether they are parting at this moment. The previous poem gave the dew on the sleeve of the parting; this one reasons toward the instant itself.
The third line fixes the place.
The word in the fourth line means mist rising off water. Mist belongs to autumn and to rivers on earth, and it is here made to rise from the river of the sky, as the three hundred and twenty-first poem gave that river a bed: the ground and weather of earth are carried up.
The auxiliary at the close marks inference from sound. Plovers too are birds of the water's edge, and the River of Heaven is treated throughout as a river like any other. Nothing is seen, and the parting is known only by mist and a bird's voice, so that the run on Tanabata ends with a leave-taking never directly shown.
- Author
- Ki no Tsurayuki
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Once in a long while the waves of the river of heaven draw them close and would that the sky at dawn had no power over them
- All the more, I fear the thought of it will end me the white dew that lies on the sleeve of the parting of the Weaver from her lord
- In the river's flow the deer has laid a weir, and it does not float free and go down with the current the autumn bush-clover bloom
- This hunting robe: I shall not dye it myself, no but leave it to be stained by the clover flowers of the moor, deep in its dew