しをりしてゆく旅なれどかりそめの
いのち知らねばかへりしもせじ
いのち知らねばかへりしもせじ
- Roma-ji
-
Shiori shite yuku tabi naredo karisome no inochi shiraneba kaeri shi mo seji
- English Translation
-
Though I break branches
to mark the road as I go
this life of ours is
a borrowed thing, and unknown
so I shall not come back here
- Meaning
- Though I break branches to mark the road as I go, this borrowed life is not a thing one can know — and so I shall not be coming back.
- Commentary
-
54 A Journey Marked by Broken Branches
A man who was the third son of Minamoto no Muneyuki had taken to gambling and was hated by his parents and his brothers alike, so he left the capital, going wherever his feet took him, and went off to another province. On the way he composed this poem and sent it to a close friend. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Minamoto no Muneyuki was a grandson of Emperor Kōkō and one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he appears in the thirtieth through thirty-second sections, and in the thirty-fourth and thirty-ninth. The poet is his third son. Of the friend the prose tells us only that they were close.
The setting is the road out of the capital. He set out with no destination, the prose says, going wherever his feet took him.
What prompted the poem was that departure. It was sent to the friend he left behind.
The section ends with the poem; no reply and no later event is recorded.
The word in the first line means breaking branches to mark a path, and carries the sound of the word for being harried or driven out. A journey marked for the return and a journey forced on him are heard together.
The concessive that follows turns on it: he leaves marks, and yet. One marks a road in order to come back, and that assumption is about to fail.
What he calls a borrowed life is a life held on short terms; and he says one cannot know it — cannot know whether he will live to return.
The closing states that he will not be coming back. He breaks branches for the road and says he will not use them. That contradiction is the whole state of a man with nowhere to go.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
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- A heart as deep as the sea I keep, and yet — off shore, out of your sight — it turns out to be a thing that gets itself resented
- The deer that pushes through the autumn fields — does it too, like me, cry out and raise its voice, held back by the thick growth that stands between
- He was the one who said he would come back at once and so, though I hear that all is over with him still I find myself waiting
- Evening comes on and the road is lost to sight, yet to that old dwelling I go, giving the horse its head — it knew the way before