Prevod

Long ago there was a sumo wrestler named Tsuneyori. Beside his house ran an old river, with a deep pool in one stretch of it. One summer day he was walking about with a single boy attendant, dressed only in an unlined robe tied at the waist, wearing high wooden clogs and carrying a staff of the kind called a matafuri. Finding shade near the river, he sat down beneath a tree beside the pool to cool himself. The water was a fearsome blue, so deep that its bottom could not be seen, and reeds and rushes grew thickly along the edge. He rose and stood near the water, looking out. The opposite bank seemed to be six or seven tan away. Presently he saw the water surging toward him and wondered what could be causing it. As the disturbance approached the shore where he stood, a snake thrust its head above the surface. “This must be a great snake,” he thought. “Is it coming ashore here?” As he watched, the snake raised its head and stared steadily at him. Wondering what it had in mind, he stepped back about a foot from the water’s edge, then moved close again to see what it would do. For a while it kept staring at him, then drew its head beneath the surface. He saw the water surge toward the opposite bank, but soon waves came rolling back toward him. This time the snake lifted its tail out of the water and reached it toward the spot where he stood. “This snake has something in mind,” he thought, and stood watching, letting it do as it pleased. It stretched its tail farther and wound it three or four times around his legs. He remained where he was, wondering what it meant to do. Once it had secured its coils, it began to pull with a fierce, tightening grip. Only then did he realize that it meant to drag him into the river. He braced his feet and stood firm. The pull was so tremendous that he snapped the supports beneath his wooden clogs. On the verge of being dragged down, he recovered his footing and planted himself again. To call the pull strong would scarcely do it justice: he felt certain he would be hauled away. He drove his feet down with all his strength until each had sunk five or six inches into the earth. “It certainly can pull,” he was thinking, when something parted with a sound like a rope snapping, and blood welled up through the water. “So it has torn apart,” he thought. He drew back his legs, hauling the snake’s severed tail ashore with them. He unwound it from his legs and washed them in the river, but the marks of its coils would not disappear. Someone told him that wine was what he should wash them with, so he sent for some and washed them again. Afterward he summoned his servants and had them pull the tail end out of the water. To call it large would hardly convey its size: the severed end appeared to measure a full foot across. He sent someone to look for the head end. There was a great tree root on the opposite bank, and the snake had wound the front of its body around it many times before reaching its tail across the river, coiling it around his legs, and pulling. Its strength had proved unequal to his, and it had evidently torn itself in two. Astonishing indeed, that it should have pulled without even knowing its own body was coming apart! Later, wishing to discover how many men’s strength the snake had possessed, Tsuneyori had a stout rope fastened around his legs where the snake had coiled and told about ten men to pull. “Not enough yet, not enough,” he kept saying. Only when some sixty men were pulling did he say, “Yes, that is about how it felt.” When one considers this, it seems that Tsuneyori must have possessed the strength of a hundred men.