Au koto wa ima wa kagiri to omoedomo namida wa taenu mono ni zo arikeru

English Translation

Our meetings, I know
have come now to their last end
I tell myself so
and still the tears are something
that will never come to end

Meaning

I tell myself that we shall not meet again, that this is the end of it. And still the tears turn out to be a thing that does not end.

Commentary

7 A Parting Not Yet Done

A man and a woman had been close for some years when a very small matter came between them and they parted. Yet there had been no year in which either had tired of the other, and the man went on feeling the loss, so he sent her this poem. She too, we are told, was deeply moved by it. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Of neither the man nor the woman does the prose give a name or a rank. In a book made up of exchanges between named poets, this is one of the short sections dealing with people who are not identified.
Neither the time nor the place is given. All we are told is that the two had lived together for years and parted over something trivial.
What prompted the poem was that the man's feeling outlasted the parting. The prose is careful to say that neither had tired of the other, and then gives his poem.
After the poem it is recorded that the woman too was moved. There is no reply; the section ends with a single sentence about her response. The poem was later included in the Shinchokusen-shū.

The upper verse tells him there will be no more meetings, using the word for a last time, an end of the matter. Its concessive grammar warns that the telling will not hold.
The lower verse says the tears will not stop. The judgement of the mind and what the body does are set side by side and kept apart, which is the same construction as Taifu's poem in the fifth section, "Wabinureba ima wa to mono o omoedomo kokoro ni ninu wa namida narikeri".
An emphatic particle governs the final verb, which has the force of a discovery: so that is how it is. He is surprised at himself.
Because the prose has already ruled out either of them having grown tired of the other, the tears are given their reason before we reach them. A single sentence about the woman's response follows, and the section closes without an exchange of poems.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other