たもとともしのばざらまし秋風に
なびく尾花のおどろかさずは
なびく尾花のおどろかさずは
- Roma-ji
-
Tamoto to mo shinobazaramashi akikaze ni nabiku obana no odorokasazu wa
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- You would never have thought of any sleeve, or of me, if the pampas plumes bending in the autumn wind had not jolted you into it.
- Commentary
-
17 Pampas Plumes in the Wind
The Lesser Captain, stepfather to the Lady of Dewa, had been visiting her while she served the late Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial, but in time he stopped coming. Afterwards she tied a letter to a stem of pampas grass and sent it to him; he answered with "Akikaze ni nabiku obana wa mukashi mishi tamoto ni nite zo koishikarikeru", and her reply was "Tamoto to mo shinobazaramashi akikaze ni nabiku obana no odorokasazu wa". The section closes with the exchange.
The late Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial headed that ministry and appears again in the eighteenth through twentieth sections. The Lady of Dewa was a woman in his service, named for that province. The Lesser Captain is the man of the sixteenth section, where he exchanges poems with the Assistant Handmaid of the retired Emperor Yōzei.
The setting is the same autumn, after his reply reached her.
What prompted her poem is the one he sent, "Akikaze ni nabiku obana wa mukashi mishi tamoto ni nite zo koishikarikeru", with its declaration of longing.
This reply closes the seventeenth section, and the fact that the pampas grass came from her in the first place is what makes it work.
The grammar is that of a condition contrary to fact: had it not been so, then this.
The whole poem says that if the pampas plumes had not startled him — jolted him into remembering — no sleeve and no woman would have crossed his mind.
She traces the feeling he has just declared back to her own gift. Instead of reproaching him she points out how his words came to exist at all.
The conditional is held back to the very end, so that the denial comes first and only afterwards the reason for it.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Even the grasses of this house you have let run to waste and ruin these I picked before all else thinking they were for your sake
- I live on, and yet I am one who does not love so why, when evening comes on, should I be taken by a sadness with no cause