けふのまの心にかへて思ひやれ
詠めつゝのみすくす月日を
詠めつゝのみすくす月日を
- Roma-ji
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Kyō no ma no kokoro ni kaete omoiyare nagametsutsu nomi sugusu tsukihi o
- English Translation
-
Against the feeling
you have known for just this one day,
measure, I pray, and guess
the months and days I pass alone
gazing, lost in brooding thought
- Meaning
- Weigh it against what you have felt for just this one day, and imagine the months and days I pass doing nothing but gazing out in sorrow.
- Commentary
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2 The First Letters
After the exchange over the orange blossom, letters began to arrive from the prince. Izumi Shikibu was not by nature one to brood deeply, but she was finding her unaccustomed idleness hard to bear, and so, trifling though it was, the correspondence caught her heart and she began to reply. The prince wrote often, she answered now and then, and she felt her loneliness eased a little.
The woman is Izumi Shikibu, daughter of Ōe no Masamune and, as the wife of Tachibana no Michisada, Governor of Izumi, mother of Koshikibu no Naishi. The Prince of the Dazaifu is Prince Atsumichi, fourth son of Emperor Reizei, so called because he served as Governor-General of the Dazaifu. His elder brother Prince Tametaka had been Izumi Shikibu's lover and had died in the sixth month of Chōhō 4 (1002).
When the prince's poem "Uchiidede mo arinishi mono o nakanaka ni kurushiki made mo nageku kyō kana" arrived, it caught her eye, slight as it was, and she sent back this reply.
From then on the prince wrote frequently and she answered from time to time, and her idleness felt a little consoled. Before long a poem came from the prince asking to meet and talk.
The opening lines mean "weighing it against your feeling of just this one day," taking up the prince's "today." The third line is an imperative, urging him to imagine.
The lower verses, placed last by inversion, mean "the months and days I pass only gazing in sorrow," the gazing being the absent stare of one sunk in thought. Treating his grief as a matter of a single day and setting it against her own long months of mourning since the death of the late prince, she gently brushes aside his lament while confiding her own loneliness.
- Author
- Izumi Shikibu
- Source
- Izumi Shikibu Nikki
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