浪の立つかたも知らねどわたつみの
うらやましくもおもほゆるかな
うらやましくもおもほゆるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Nami no tatsu kata mo shiranedo watatsumi no urayamashiku mo omooyuru kana
- English Translation
-
I do not know which
way the waves are setting, and
yet — like the sea's own
bays and inlets — I find that
I envy them, I envy
- Meaning
- I do not know which way the waves are setting; and still, like the bays of the sea, I find that I envy them.
- Commentary
-
96 How I Envy Them
After the events of the ninety-fourth section, the Ninth Lady was married to the Chamberlain; and at that time, as the ninety-fifth section records, the Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial had stopped coming to the Lady of the Bedchamber of Sanjō. Fujiwara no Saneyori, later Minister of the Left, then still Commander of the Right Gate Guards, sent her this poem. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Fujiwara no Saneyori was a son of the Chancellor Fujiwara no Tadahira and rose to Minister of the Left. The Fujiwara no Morotada of the ninety-fourth section was his half-brother, and is the Chamberlain named here. The Lady of the Bedchamber of Sanjō was a daughter of Fujiwara no Sadakata and appears in the ninety-fourth and ninety-fifth sections. The Commander of the Right Gate Guards headed that office.
The setting is the time of the Ninth Lady's marriage to the Chamberlain, and of the prince's ceasing to visit the Lady of Sanjō.
What prompted the poem was hearing that the Chamberlain had been chosen as a husband. It was sent to the Lady of Sanjō.
The section ends with the poem; no reply and no later event is recorded. The hundred and twentieth section tells of the Lady of Sanjō and Saneyori.
The word in the second line means a direction, the way the waves set, and carries with it the way a heart inclines.
The concessive turns on it: he does not know, and yet.
The word for the sea leads into the word that follows, whose first syllables are also the word for a bay, and for what lies inside a person.
The closing is an exclamation of envy. He envies his brother's marriage, and at the same moment declares himself to a woman the prince has left. Sea words hold the poem together while it makes its confession, and this is where the story that reaches the hundred and twentieth section begins.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- The wish to stay on as that unhatched egg — my heart I leave here with you But I am told there would be no use, no life, in staying
- On Shirayama the snow has fallen and the tracks are gone; and now no one comes along the road of Koshi, the road once come
- The moon that was hid has come round and risen a- gain — and even in its light, in all that light, she is nowhere to be seen now
- I had thought the one sorrow was the taking off of mourning — and yet here is another colour that keeps her memory too