Korizuma no ura ni kazukamu ukimiru wa nami sawagashiku ari koso wa seme

English Translation

The drifting seaweed
you would dive for in the bay
of the unrepentant
will have the waves breaking round
it, noisy and unquiet

Meaning

The drifting seaweed you would dive for in the bay of the unrepentant will have the waves breaking noisily around it.

Commentary

79 The Bay of the Unrepentant

This too is a poem the Lady of the Palace Guards sent to the Prince of the Board of Censors. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The two are those of the seventy-eighth section, where the prince fell in love at first sight at the New Year ceremonies, wrote to her, and received a poem pressing on the lightness of his feeling.
Neither time nor place is given. All we are told is that the poem went to the same prince.
The prose records nothing of what prompted it. Following on from the previous section, it reads as an answer to further letters from him.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded.

The name of the bay contains the words for not learning one's lesson, so that a suitor who will not be discouraged is written into the place name itself.
The verb means to dive for something under water. The seaweed named is a kind of edible weed whose name is also the verb for seeing, and the first part of the word means both floating and wretched — so that weed adrift on the water and the seeing of hard things become one word.
The waves breaking noisily are both the sea and the talk of people.
The closing states it and stops there. Bay, diving, drifting weed and waves keep the sea in view throughout, and what she tells him is that persisting will earn him grief and gossip together. As in the previous section, she neither refuses nor accepts.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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