いかにしてかく思ふてふことをだに
人づてならで君に聞かせむ
人づてならで君に聞かせむ
- Roma-ji
-
Ikani shite kaku omou chō koto o dani hitozute narade kimi ni kikasemu
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- How am I to bring this one thing — that I feel as I do — to your hearing, not through someone else's mouth but straight from me?
- 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 same period of courtship.
The prose records nothing further of what prompted it, saying only that he composed this as well.
Poem followed poem until the morning after their night together. This one was later included in the Gosen-shū.
The first line means: by what means, somehow. The want of any means is carried by it.
What follows asks for this one thing at least — not a meeting, only that his feeling should reach her.
Not through another's mouth: poems went by messenger, and the position of a man who cannot say anything to her face is exactly what the phrase names.
The closing states the wish. Since the poem itself is going by messenger, the wish cannot be granted inside it. That impossibility is itself the appeal.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Though I were to search the thousand-fathom shore of the sea at Ise and pick up shells there — it would be to no purpose, not now