植田文竅（敬）

詞書

掃塵之日謝準令郎

本文

啜茗南隣不識囂。
帰家早已■（歛）塵濤。
且驚且謝準童子。
守約遠来代我劳（勞）。

署名

敬

読み下だし

英訳

Sipping tea in the southern suburbs, away from the noisy hubbub,
I've returned home to find that the dust has all been swept away.
Taken by surprise, I express my gratitude to the young lad Jun,
For keeping his promise to come from afar to help on my behalf.

Title: The word 令郎 (Jp. reirō, Ch.ling-lang), which we have rendered as "fine fellow") is an honorific designation for another person's son.

Line one: The compound 南隣 ("southern suburbs") might instead be translated "neighbor to the south."

Line two: "Dust" 塵 is written in the original tanzaku using an unusual cursive form not reproducible here. We thank the Heian jinbutsushi research group for helping to identify this character and correcting the Tanzaku shūei text. The meaning of the final character 濤 (nami "waves" namidatsu" to billow," terasu "flood with light") is unclear. Professor Mitsuta suggests it could perhaps be read independently of the phrase 歛塵 and mean "to brighten" (terasu), as a result of cleaning. But what it might mean in combination with 塵 is uncertain: the literal meaning of the phrase 塵濤 is "billows of dust," so perhaps the poet is speaking hyperbolically of accumulations of dust or dirt.

Line four: We thank colleagues in the Heian jinbutsushi group for correcting the second character in this line, erroneously transcribed as 物 in the Tanzaku shūei text, p.4.

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