せかなくに絶えと絶えにし山水の
たれしのべとか声を聞かせむ
たれしのべとか声を聞かせむ
- Roma-ji
-
Sekanaku ni tae to taenishi yamamizu no tare shinobe to ka koe o kikasemu
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- No one dammed it, and still the mountain stream has failed, failed altogether. For whose sake would I let you hear its voice now?
- Commentary
-
23 Though None Dammed It
The second son of the retired Emperor Yōzei had for years been visiting the daughter of Captain Nochikage, but after he obtained the Fifth Princess he stopped coming altogether. Giving him up for lost, she sank into misery. Then, after some time, he came without warning; and she, unable to speak to him, fled and shut herself behind a door. He went home, and the next morning sent word asking why she had hidden, when he had come to talk over everything that had passed. She wrote no prose in her letter, only this poem.
The second son was a son of Emperor Yōzei after his abdication. Captain Nochikage held a post as second officer in the Palace Guards, and the poet is his daughter. Of the Fifth Princess the prose tells us nothing beyond the number in her title.
The setting is the morning after his visit. The night before, she had avoided him behind a closed door.
What prompted the poem was his message that morning. To his question she returned not a line of prose, only a poem.
The section ends there; his response is not recorded. The poem was later included in the Shokugosen-shū.
The first line means: though no one dammed it. The image of stopping a stream says that the ending of his visits was not her doing.
The second line repeats its verb to insist that the water failed utterly, and the failed mountain stream is his vanished coming.
The lower verse asks for whose sake she would let its voice be heard. Once the water has gone, there is no one left to hear it. The voice is at once the sound of water and his own words.
She spoke to him neither that night nor that morning, and the poem's talk of letting a voice be heard answers exactly to that. Writing no prose was itself the reply.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- In this dwelling place that has no master, I see the pine standing dead and it is as though a thou- sand years had gone by since then