駒にこそまかせたりけれはかなくも
心の来ると思ひけるかな
心の来ると思ひけるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Koma ni koso makasetarikere hakanaku mo kokoro no kuru to omoikeru kana
- English Translation
-
So it was the horse
you gave the reins to, after
all — and foolishly
I had been thinking that it
was your heart that brought you here
- Meaning
- So it was the horse you gave the reins to, after all. And foolishly I had been thinking it was your heart that brought you.
- Commentary
-
56 The Horse That Knew the Road
Taira no Kanemori, Provisional Governor of Echizen, had been visiting a woman known as the Lady of Hyōe. After a long absence he went to her again and composed "Yū sareba michi mo mienedo furusato wa moto koshi koma ni makasete zo yuku", and her reply was "Koma ni koso makasetarikere hakanaku mo kokoro no kuru to omoikeru kana". That is the whole of the section.
Taira no Kanemori served as Provisional Governor of Echizen and is counted among the thirty-six poetic immortals; a provisional governor was one appointed over and above the regular establishment. He appears again in the fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth sections. Of the Lady of Hyōe the prose tells us only the office her name comes from.
The setting is the same night, after his poem reached her.
What prompted it is the poem he sent, "Yū sareba michi mo mienedo furusato wa moto koshi koma ni makasete zo yuku", with its account of a horse that knew the way.
This reply closes the fifty-sixth section. The prose passes no judgement; the section consists of the exchange alone. It too was included in the Gosen-shū.
The first line, with its emphatic construction, restricts what he gave the reins to: the horse, and not his heart.
She takes the very phrase he had offered and turns it into his weakness. The horse came; he did not.
The third line calls her own supposition foolish, so that the mistake is put on her side.
The closing exclaims that she had thought his heart had brought him. She does not accuse him; by saying she was mistaken, she lets the lightness of his claim show for itself. Borrowing the other's words and shifting their sense is a pattern that recurs throughout the exchanges in this book.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- In a hill village where far and near alike no one passes — did you ever think, in those days, that you would make your home in it
- In Michinoku at Kurozuka, out on Adachi's wide plain they say an ogre is shut up there — can this be true, then