堤正敏

詞書

題桃源回

本文

歸到板橋緑水通。
錬丹家在小川東。
桃花坊與仙源似。
鶴髪童顔本命翁。

署名

堤正敏拝

読み下だし

英訳

He's gone back to the plank bridge where green waters flow.
The cinnabar refiner's house stand east of a little stream.
The Peach-blossom abode reminds one of the immortals' magic spring.
With crane-like hair and a youthful face, this sixty-year old man.

Title: The legendary Peach-blossom Spring of Chinese literary lore is described in a famous short story by T'ao Ch'ien (365 - 428), who relates how a fisherman follows a stream all the way back to its source, discovering that it issues forth from within a cave. Upon entering and exploring the cave, he discovers it leads to another world, a marvelous land of enchanting beauty and happiness where time stands still. For the story, see Cyril Birch, trans. and comp., Anthology of Chinese Literature from Early Times to the Fourteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 167 - 168 . The peach, traditionally seen as a source of life-giving and disease-curing power, has long been associated with fecundity, longevity, and the quest for immortality.

Line two: The cinnabar refiner's cottage is presumably the dwelling of the old man mentioned in line four, who, it is implied, has remained young by using cinnabar elixirs. Cinnabar (tansha) 丹砂 (HgS), a crystalline mercuric sulphide, was used to prepare many Taoist elixirs.

Line three: The so-called "Peach-blossom abode" (Jp. Tōkabō 桃花坊) depicted in this painting may simply be a fanciful reference to the cinnabar refiner's cottage (line two), which is being likened to the imaginary immortals' abode of the Chinese tale of the Peach-blossom Spring. Another possibility suggested by colleagues in the Heian jinbutshi shi group is that the Tōkabō depicted here is the old Tōkabō library, which was part of the residential estate once owned by the Muromachi statesman and literati Ichijō Kaneyoshi (1402 - 1481). In the Tōkabō, Kaneyoshi reputedly amassed some 35,000 volumes. The home and the Tōkabō library were burned to the ground during the Ōnin Wars.

Line four: The crane is a common symbol of longevity. The "youthful [childlike] face" (童顔) is a further sign of the subject's immortal status, gained, we are supposed to infer, from having taken cinnabar elixirs. Age sixty marked the beginning of a new cycle in the sexegenary scheme of reckoning the passing of years. Tradition held that sixty was the normal expected human life span.

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