みるめなきわがみをうらと知らねばや
かれなで海人の足たゆくくる
かれなで海人の足たゆくくる
- Roma-ji
-
Mirume naki waga mi o ura to shiraneba ya
karenade ama no ashi tayuku kuru - English Translation
-
Knowing not, perhaps,
that I am like a shore
where no miru grows,
the fisherman, not weary,
drags his feet and comes.
- Meaning
- Not knowing, perhaps, that I am like a shore where no miru seaweed grows and thus nothing to see, the fisherman comes on, dragging his weary feet without ceasing.
- Commentary
-
Episode Twenty-Five: "In autumn fields"
There was a woman who neither said she would meet nor that she would not meet, but only teased the man with no clear reply, and for that very reason she was all the more alluring.
This poem is her reply to the man’s poem, "In autumn fields, my sleeves, parting the bamboo grass at break of day—yet more than that dew-wetness are the nights I lie without you."
Playing on "miru" as both "to see" and the seaweed miru, she likens herself to a shore where no miru grows, and the man to a fisherman who comes.
This poem is also included in the Kokinshū as a poem by Ono no Komachi. Since the man’s poem and this one appear together there, they may have been arranged as an exchange; perhaps for that reason the two poems do not seem perfectly matched.
- Source
- Ise Monogatari
- Other
-
- Loving still, I could not detain the one who left, not loving me the same— and now my life has faded away.
- In autumn fields, my sleeves, parting the bamboo grass at break of day— yet more than that dew-wetness are the nights I lie without you.
- Unaware, somehow, at my sleeves the harbor is all in tumult; only because a great Chinese ship has drawn near.
- I alone, I thought, had one so given to thought— none other there was; yet beneath the water’s surface, there was one more.