Naki hito o kimi ga kikaku ni kakeji tote nakunaku shinobu hodo na urami so

English Translation

So as not to bring
the dead one to your hearing
I have wept alone
and borne it: do not hold that
long silence against me now

Meaning

It was to keep the dead from reaching your ears that I have wept alone and held myself back. Do not hold that silence against me.

Commentary

13 Weeping and Bearing It

Fujiwara no Chikane, a third-rank officer of the Right Horse Bureau, had a wife named Toshiko. They had many children and were devoted to one another, but she died, and Chikane went about his days in unbounded grief. A woman known as the Lady of Ichijō, a chamberlain in the palace, had been very close to Toshiko. Yet at this of all times she did not come, and Chikane was wondering at it when he met a servant woman of hers. He entrusted her with "Omoiki ya suginishi hito no kanashiki ni kimi sae tsuraku naramu mono to wa", and the reply came: "Naki hito o kimi ga kikaku ni kakeji tote nakunaku shinobu hodo na urami so". The section closes with the exchange.
Fujiwara no Chikane held the third rank in the Right Horse Bureau and was a son of Fujiwara no Tadafusa, known as a poet; Tadafusa's daughter appears in the eleventh section as the Lady of the East Wing. Toshiko was Chikane's wife, entrusted with the preparations for the retired emperor's celebration in the third section and composing a poem of condolence in the ninth. The Lady of Ichijō was a chamberlain in the palace and had been close to Toshiko.
The setting is the moment after Chikane's poem reached her by way of her servant.
What prompted her poem is the one he sent, "Omoiki ya suginishi hito no kanashiki ni kimi sae tsuraku naramu mono to wa", with its charge that she had not come.
This reply closes the thirteenth section. The prose passes no judgement; the section consists of the exchange alone.

Her middle lines mean that she would not bring the dead woman within his hearing, so that her silence is offered as the very form her care took; the grammar is that of a refusal she has set herself.
Saying that she wept while enduring it shows there were tears on her side too, and that the absence was not indifference. The word in the fourth line means the interval, the stretch of time in which she stayed away.
The last line is a plain prohibition: do not hold it against me.
The reasoning is a little laboured, though, and there is something of the excuse about it; how that is taken depends on what the two of them were to each other.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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