岡崎元軌

詞書

七夕作

本文

雨晴秋暑未全除。
一醉佳期卧（臥）草廬。
懶性還嗤晋（晉）人套。
竿頭犢鼻腹中書。

署名

元軌

読み下だし

英訳

The rain has ceased but the autumn heat has not yet disappeared.
Tipsy from drink this special day, loafing in my cottage.
Lazy by nature, I laugh at the ways of that man who lived during Chin,
Reaching for the stars, clad just in a loin cloth, his mind full of books.

Line one: The Star Festival, Tanabata, is one of the major Japanese traditional festivals, occurring on the seventh day of the seventh month by the lunar calendar (around mid-August by the Western calendar）, when the summer heat was at its most intense. See SBK 74 - 1, below, for further information.

Line three: This is a reference to the Chin dynasty, 265 - 420. The poet in fact appears to be alluding to a scholar named Liu Chou 劉昼 (?516 - 567?), who lived not during Chin times but considerably later, in the sixth century. His biography is contained in Pei shih 北史 (History of the North), a work covering the fourth through the sixth centuries. Liu's biography describes him as a poor orphan from Fou-ch'eng 阜城 who never wearied of his studies, staying inside with the door shut to read his books, wearing only a loin cloth on evenings when it was hot. The poet probably thought of Liu Chou at this particular moment because of the intense, enervating heat.

Line four: The phrase which we have rendered with the idiom "reaching for the stars," is 竿頭 ("the tip of a bamboo pole") in the original text and is a part of the well-known expression 百尺竿頭 [進む一歩]. This saying denotes going one step further in one's efforts than the distance one considers sufficient, reaching heights as high as a one-hundred shaku (roughly thirty meters ) bamboo pole is long. The Heian jinbutsushi research group at Nichibunken has pointed out a second, more literal image associated with 竿頭, one related to the summertime Tanabata Festival. Bamboo poles, with leaves still attached, are desplayed during this festival and decorated with brightly colored paper tanzaku strips recording people's hopes and wishes. As this phrase is immediately adjacent to "loin cloth," perhaps the poet, aiming at a comic effect, wished to convey that he had washed and hung his own loincloth out to dry on a bamboo pole during the hot Tanabata Festival, leaving him stark naked over his books (and thus far more eccentric than even Liu Chou). If so, line four might read, "My loincloth out on the bamboo pole, my mind full of books."

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