春の野に生ひじとぞ思ふ忘れ草
つらき心の種しなければ
つらき心の種しなければ
- Roma-ji
-
Haru no no ni oiji to zo omou wasuregusa tsuraki kokoro no tane shi nakereba
- English Translation
-
In the spring meadow
no such grass will grow, I think
the forgetting grass
for there is no seed in me
of any coldness of heart
- Meaning
- No such grass will grow in that spring meadow, I think — the grass of forgetting. There is no seed of coldness in me for it to grow from.
- Commentary
-
16 The Grass of Forgetting
The Lady Assistant Handmaid of the retired Emperor Yōzei sent "Haru no no wa haruke nagara mo wasuregusa ouru wa miyuru mono ni zo arikeru" to her stepfather, a Lesser Captain. His reply was "Haru no no ni oiji to zo omou wasuregusa tsuraki kokoro no tane shi nakereba". The section closes with the exchange.
An Assistant Handmaid was the second officer of the palace attendants' bureau. This one served the retired Emperor Yōzei. The Lesser Captain was her mother's second husband. The same Captain appears in the seventeenth section, exchanging poems with the Lady of Dewa, who served the late Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial.
The setting is the same spring.
What prompted the poem is the one she sent him, "Haru no no wa haruke nagara mo wasuregusa ouru wa miyuru mono ni zo arikeru", with its charge that the grass of forgetting can be seen growing.
This reply closes the sixteenth section. The prose passes no judgement; the section consists of the exchange alone.
He takes up her spring field and her grass of forgetting exactly as she offered them, and answers that no such grass grows there; the grammar is that of a negative supposition.
An emphatic particle in the second line pushes the judgement forward: this is what I think.
The reason comes in the lower verse: the seed of a cold heart. Grass needs a seed, which is obvious enough, and he applies that plain fact directly to the heart, with a further emphatic particle insisting that no such seed exists at all.
No wish to forget, therefore no grass. Answering a poem by reusing its own words and turning them into an argument is the same construction as the exchange about the pine of Suminoe in the eleventh section.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- On this worthless self the white jewel that settles in the night is one that only lets its faint light show for a moment, and go
- The fields of springtime stretch far away, and even so, the grass that makes one forget can still be seen growing plain enough to me
- The plumes of pampas bending in the autumn wind are so like the sleeve I saw in those days long past that longing has come on me
- You would not have thought of any sleeve, nor of me had the pampas plumes bending in the autumn wind not startled you into it