Iitsutsu mo yo wa hakanaki o katami ni wa aware to ikade kimi ni miemashi

English Translation

Even as we talk
the world is a fleeting thing
so how am I to
show you what I feel — how make
this shared tenderness be seen

Meaning

Even as we sit talking, the world is a fleeting thing. How, then, am I to let you see the tenderness we feel for one another?

Commentary

41 The World Is a Fleeting Thing

Toshiko was constantly at the Major Counsellor Minamoto's house, and sometimes had a room there and lived in it. She was a woman of feeling, and there was nothing she and the Major Counsellor did not discuss. On days when there was nothing in particular to do, four of them would gather: the Major Counsellor, Toshiko, the elder of Toshiko's daughters, called Ayatsuko, and a woman in the Major Counsellor's household called Yobuko. Ayatsuko took after her mother and was a woman of feeling; Yobuko too understood such things and was much the same. The four of them talked of everything, and of how fleeting the world is, and of all that moves one in it; and it was then that the Major Counsellor composed this poem. When he did, not one of them could answer it, and they drew close together and wept aloud. They were people such as one rarely finds, the prose concludes.
The Major Counsellor Minamoto is Minamoto no Kiyokage, a son of Emperor Yōzei, who entrusts Toshiko with the offerings in the third section and exchanges poems with the Lady of the East Wing in the eleventh. Toshiko was the wife of Fujiwara no Chikane, appears in the third and ninth sections, and dies in the thirteenth. Ayatsuko was her daughter; Yobuko was of the Major Counsellor's household.
The setting is his house, on an idle day, with four close companions together.
What prompted the poem was their talk about the transience of the world. The conversation turns directly into the poem.
Afterwards no one could reply; they drew together and wept. The section closes on that scene and on the judgement that they were rare people. The poem was later included in the Shinchokusen-shū.

The first phrase means: even while we are saying all this. It points at the very conversation they are having.
The second names what they have been discussing — that the world does not last — and its grammar turns on it: since that is so.
The third line means: to one another, mutually. What they understand between them now has no way of being shown.
The closing question is rhetorical: by what means could it be shown? He does not celebrate their understanding; he laments that there is no form in which to keep it. That the company could not reply and wept instead is because the lament held for every one of them.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other