Kuyashiku zo nochi ni awamu to chigirikeru kyō o kagiri to iwamashi mono o

English Translation

How it galls me now
that we promised to meet a-
gain another day
I should have said instead that
today was the last of it

Meaning

How it galls me that we promised to meet again another day. I should have said that today was the last of it.

Commentary

101 We Said We Would Meet Later

The same Lesser Captain Fujiwara no Suenawa had been ill, and when he was a little better he came to the palace. This was while Minamoto no Kintada, Governor of Ōmi, was still second officer of the Cleaning Office and a chamberlain besides. Meeting Kintada, Suenawa said that he was not yet quite himself, but that low spirits and concern for his duties had brought him; that he would withdraw for today and report properly the day after tomorrow; and that Kintada should tell the emperor so. Then he went home. Some three days later a letter came from him, and on it was written nothing but this poem. Alarmed, Kintada asked the messenger in tears how things stood, and the man said only that he had grown very weak, and began to weep, and nothing more could be got from him. Saying he would go himself, Kintada sent for his carriage and drove to the Captain's house at Gojō, where all was in confusion and the gate was shut. The Captain was dead. No one would even answer his enquiries, and he went home weeping. When all this was reported, the emperor too was much moved.
Fujiwara no Suenawa held the rank of Lesser Captain; he composes the poem about the yellow roses at Ōi in the hundredth section, and was the father of the Ukon of the eighty-first through eighty-fifth. Minamoto no Kintada served as Governor of Ōmi, conveys news of a promotion in a poem in the fourth section, and is counted among the thirty-six poetic immortals.
The setting is three days after their meeting at the palace, with Suenawa near death.
What prompted the poem was that the promise to report for duty could not be kept. It came to Kintada by letter.
Kintada hurried there and found the gate closed. The section ends with the emperor's being moved. The poem was later included in the Shinkokin-shū.

The poem opens on regret, and an emphatic particle carries that first word through to the verb that ends it, so that the whole rests on it.
What he regrets is having promised to meet again — the word he left behind about reporting for duty the day after tomorrow.
The closing says he should have called that day the last, in the grammar of what did not happen, and breaks off on a particle of regret.
He knows he is dying and never says so; he laments only the form his promise took. The prose notes that the letter contained nothing else, so that this one poem is his whole farewell. As in the fourth section, where Kintada himself put a piece of news into a poem rather than into prose, what matters is kept out of the letter and put into the verse.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other