うちつけにまどふ心と聞くからに
なぐさめやすくおぼほゆるかな
なぐさめやすくおぼほゆるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Uchitsuke ni madou kokoro to kiku kara ni nagusameyasuku obooyuru kana
- English Translation
-
A heart that has lost
its way all of a sudden —
merely to hear that
is to think it will be soon
and easily comforted
- Meaning
- A heart that lost its way all of a sudden — merely hearing of it, I think it will be soon and easily comforted.
- Commentary
-
78 A Heart in Confusion
When the Lady of the Palace Guards appeared at the New Year ceremonies, the Prince of the Board of Censors fell in love with her at first sight and sent her a letter; this poem was her reply. The prince's answer, the prose concludes, has now been forgotten.
The Lady of the Palace Guards appears repeatedly in this book: with the Prince of the Ministry of Central Affairs in the eighth section, before her old house in the tenth, with the Lesser Captain in the twenty-first and twenty-second, and in the sixty-ninth and seventieth in the story of Fujiwara no Tadafumi's son.
The setting is the New Year ceremonies, where the prince first saw her.
What prompted the poem was his letter. It is her reply.
He composed an answer, but the prose records that it has been forgotten — judging a poem by whether anyone bothered to remember it. Her poem was later included in the Shinsenzai-shū.
The first word means all at once, out of nowhere. She takes his declaration of love at first sight and turns it on its suddenness.
Merely hearing of a heart in confusion is enough, the grammar marking the response as immediate.
What follows is that it will be easily comforted: a feeling that arose so quickly should settle just as quickly.
The closing is an exclamation. She does not credit the depth of his feeling but presses on its lightness, and without refusing or accepting she simply points out how his claim was made. The seventy-ninth section gives another poem to the same prince in the same key.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- Through the long night I keep watch till dawn at Akashi where they burn the salt Does the smoke of it not rise and stand up against the sky
- The old bamboo man wept night after night, they say and tried to keep her And tonight, tonight of all nights, she goes to her lord's house
- The drifting seaweed you would dive for in the bay of the unrepentant will have the waves breaking round it, noisy and unquiet
- I have come and looked and my heart is not eased by it — though in this old place the flowers are falling just as they always have done