Shiratsuyu no okifushi tare o koitsuramu ware wa kikiowazu Isonokami nite

English Translation

Rising, lying down
amid the white dew — for whom
was all that longing
I shall not take it for mine
old as I am, at Iso-

Meaning

Rising and lying down amid the white dew, for whom was all that longing? I shall not take it as meant for me — I am too old a thing for that.

Commentary

46 At Isonokami

Heichū, after a long break in his relations with the Lady of Kan'in, met her again. Afterwards he sent her "Uchitokete kimi wa netsuramu ware wa shimo tsuyu no okiite koi ni akashitsu", and her reply was "Shiratsuyu no okifushi tare o koitsuramu ware wa kikiowazu Isonokami nite". That is the whole of the section.
Heichū is Taira no Sadafun, known as a great lover, who appears again in the hundred and third section. Of the Lady of Kan'in the prose tells us only the residence her name comes from.
The setting is the moment after his poem reached her.
What prompted it is the poem he sent, "Uchitokete kimi wa netsuramu ware wa shimo tsuyu no okiite koi ni akashitsu", with its claim of a sleepless night.
This reply closes the forty-sixth section. The prose passes no judgement; the section consists of the exchange alone.

She takes his verb for the settling of dew and turns it into rising and lying down — the ordinary round of the days — while keeping the dew in place.
The question that follows asks for whom all that longing was, which is to say that it can hardly have been for her.
The phrase in the fourth line means to take something as said about oneself. She declines to.
The place name in the last line functions as a fixed epithet introducing the word for growing old. By presenting herself as an old thing, she steps aside from what he has said. Borrowing the other's words and shifting their sense is a pattern that recurs throughout the exchanges in this book.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other