あだ人の頼めわたりしそめかはの
色の深さを見でやゝみなむ
色の深さを見でやゝみなむ
- Roma-ji
-
Adabito no tanome watarishi somekawa no iro no fukasa o mide ya yaminamu
- English Translation
-
Will I never see
the deep colour of the dyed
leather you promised
you faithless one, who kept me
hoping for it all this while
- Meaning
- You faithless one, who kept me hoping all this while — am I to end without ever seeing the depth of that dyed leather's colour?
- Commentary
-
22 The Colour of the Dyed Leather
The same Lesser Captain needed a strap of leather for binding his sword. The Lady of the Palace Guards said she had one, and then never sent it, so he composed this poem and sent it to her. She praised it extravagantly, hunted out the leather, and sent it to him. The section closes with the poem and that outcome.
The Lesser Captain and the Lady of the Palace Guards are the two of the twenty-first section, where they exchange poems about the grass beneath the oak grove. This section follows on from that one.
The setting is the period when he needed the strap. She had said she had one, and it had not come.
What prompted the poem was simply that the leather never arrived. It was sent as a reminder.
She praised it, found the leather, and sent it. The section ends with a poem having produced an object. It was later included in the Shokugoshūi-shū.
The poem opens by naming her a faithless person, one who cannot be relied on.
The phrase that follows means to have gone on raising expectations; its verb marks a continuing action, so that the waiting has been long.
The word for dyed leather carries in it the sound of the name of a river known for dyeing, so that a colour taken up from water is heard behind the leather.
The depth of the colour is at once the strength of the dye and the depth of feeling. The closing question asks whether he is to finish without ever seeing it, turning a reminder into a lament. It is a poem asking for an object, conducted throughout in the language of love.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
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- Though the grass that grows beneath the oak grove grows old and grows old with me I would have you not cast me aside as a useless thing
- Though the grass that grows beneath the oak grove grows old and a world grows old such a thought will not arise not ever, I think, in me
- Though none dammed it up the mountain water has failed failed and gone alto- gether: for whose sake now would I let you hear its voice
- All the day long, on the pine-clad hill where I wait the cuckoo is heard and it is when you do not come that it spares not its voice