もの思ふと月日のゆくも知らぬまに
今年は今日にはてぬとか聞く
今年は今日にはてぬとか聞く
- Roma-ji
-
Mono omou to tsukihi no yuku mo shiranu ma ni kotoshi wa kyō ni hatenu to ka kiku
- English Translation
-
So taken up with
longing that I never marked
the months and days go
I hear now that this whole year
comes to its end with today
- Meaning
- So taken up with longing that I never marked the months and days going by, I hear now that the year comes to its end today.
- Commentary
-
92 The Year Ends Today
When the late Provisional Middle Counsellor was courting the Minister of the Left's daughter, he composed "Mono omou to tsukihi no yuku mo shiranu ma ni kotoshi wa kyō ni hatenu to ka kiku" on the last day of the twelfth month of that year. He also composed "Ikani shite kaku omou chō koto o dani hitozute narade kimi ni kikasemu". Having written and written in this way, he at last spent a night with her, and on that morning composed "Kyō soe ni kurezarame ya wa to omoedomo taenu wa hito no kokoro narikeri". That is the whole of the section.
The Provisional Middle Counsellor held that office; he is the man visiting Ukon in the eighty-first and eighty-second sections, and appears again in the ninety-third. Of the Minister of the Left's daughter the prose says nothing further. The section follows the courtship from its beginning to the morning after, in three poems.
The setting is the last day of the twelfth month, the end of the year.
What prompted the poem was hearing that the year would end that day. It was sent to the Minister of the Left's daughter.
Further poems follow in the same section, leading to the morning after their night together.
The opening names what has occupied him: the brooding of love.
What follows is that he never noticed the months and days going. Saying that he lost track of time is how he states the depth of it.
The closing reports the year's ending as something he has heard, which repeats the point: he did not know it himself.
Learning the end of a year at second hand rather than seeing it is what the brooding amounts to. He makes no direct appeal, and states his case entirely by having lost count of time.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- Ill-omened, they say and shun it — but now there is no use in that: let me send with this the bitter things that have been left to me
- Ill-omened, they say and shun it — and yet you would not tell me you had none to give. Which of us two is the unkind one, I wonder
- How am I to bring this one thing — that I feel so — to your hearing: not through some other's mouth, but from myself, straight to you, somehow
- Today too will come in its own time to evening — how should it not — and still, what cannot wait so long is the human heart, it seems