福井晋

詞書

鶴久友

本文

素姿丹頂羽毛鮮。
■侍瑶（瑤)池王母前。
一作主家■（臺）沼友。
蹁躚長契幾千年。

署名

晋

読み下だし

英訳

White its body, red its crown, feathers fresh and bright.
It used to serve at the Yao Pond, by the Queen Mother of the West.
But since becoming a friend of the master of the tower and the pond,
It has strutted around, sworn to be loyal for many thousands of years.

Title: A symbol of longevity and immortality, the crane often appears in depictions of the Queen Mother of the West in her garden paradise (see the note for line two, below) as well as with other auspicious figures such as the deer, the giant tortoise, and various gods of good fortune. The crane also symbolizes wisdom and may have been intended here to represent the recipient of this poem.

Line one: The editors of the Tanzaku shūei text have mistakenly added a character not in the original text to position five in line one, while also shunting the last character of the line (鮮) to the top of line two. The second line thus ends with not the rhyme word found in the original but the sixth character in that line, with its actual rhyme word being carried over to the top of the third line, which is erroneously parsed with eight characters. The fourth line alone correct as it stands. We have amended the poem text.

Line two: Hsi Wang Mu, 西王母, the Queen Mother of the West, in Chinese folklore is the ruler of the K'un-lun mountains, where the Yao (Jasper) Pond 瑶池 is supposedly located. She is traditionally depicted as a man-eating creature with the tail of a leopard and a tiger's jaws and is often shown riding a white dragon and bearing a tray holding the peaches of immortality. From around the first century B.C., Hsi Wang Mu came to be seen as a granter of eternal life. She is also portrayed in Chinese art as a beautiful lady who possessed both "maidenly delicacy and matronly opulence" and was believed able to give to other worthies the gift of the herb of immortality (Eberhard, pp. 319 - 320).

Line three: Although it is possible that "master (mistress)" in this line refers back to the Queen Mother of the West in the preceding line, it may instead denote the individual whose home the poet was visiting, which we imagine was the setting for this verse.

Line four: The final four characters might alternatively mean "[may it] endure for many thousands of years," in which case the final couplet would read: "Now that it has become a friend of the master of the tower and the pond/ May it strut around [here] for many thousands of years."

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