たまさかにとふ人あらばわたの原
嘆きほにあげていぬとこたへよ
嘆きほにあげていぬとこたへよ
- Roma-ji
-
Tamasaka ni tou hito araba wata no hara nageki ho ni agete inu to kotaeyo
- English Translation
-
If by rare chance some-
one should come asking for me
tell them this: that she
hoisted her grief like a sail
and went out on the wide sea
- Meaning
- If by some rare chance anyone comes asking after me, tell them that she hoisted her grief like a sail and went out across the open sea.
- Commentary
-
38 Grief Hoisted Like a Sail
The daughter of the fifth son of the previous emperor was known as the Lady of Ichijō and served the Kyōgoku Lady of the Bedchamber. Something untoward obliged her to withdraw, and she composed this poem as she left the capital to become the wife of the Governor of Iki. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The fifth son of the previous emperor was that emperor's fifth prince, and the poet is his daughter. The Kyōgoku Lady of the Bedchamber was a daughter of the Minister of the Left, Fujiwara no Tokihira, and a consort of Emperor Uda; she appears in the third section. The Governor of Iki headed the administration of that island province.
The setting is the day she left the capital. Dismissed from service, she was going down as a provincial governor's wife, and Iki lies across the sea.
What prompted the poem was that departure.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded. It draws on a poem by Ariwara no Yukihira in the Kokin-shū, which asks that anyone who rarely comes enquiring be told that he is at Suma, weeping over the brine.
The first word means: by rare chance, if it should happen at all. That anyone will ask after her is treated from the start as unlikely.
The verb in the second line means to visit, and also to enquire after; its conditional leaves open whether anyone will.
The wide plain of the third line is the open sea she must cross to Iki. The word for grief in the fourth line carries the sound of the timber a mast is made from, so that hoisting a sail and hoisting one's grief become one action.
The closing is an imperative: tell them she has gone. She does not speak for herself but leaves a message with those who stay. Where Yukihira's poem describes a man waiting at Suma, close at hand, this one is spoken by someone crossing the sea away.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- Hearing it is called the capital of many reigns, like bamboo joints I have no doubt at all that a thousand years are yours here
- There are flowers that have come into bloom like this and yet, for my part am I to call this season the same spring that they are in
- The morning glory that will not wait even for the dew to settle it would have been better not to have seen it at all, then
- Though I wrap it round what will not stay hidden is the summer insect's fire, the longing that spills out beyond the body's compass