あふことのなみの下草み隠れて
しづ心なくねこそなかるれ
しづ心なくねこそなかるれ
- Roma-ji
-
Au koto no nami no shitagusa mikakurete shizugokoro naku ne koso nakarure
- English Translation
-
No meeting: like the
grasses under the water
hidden by the waves
I have no quiet in me
and root and voice, I am crying
- Meaning
- No meeting for us: like the grasses under the water, hidden by the waves, I have no quiet in me, and I cry aloud.
- Commentary
-
113 The Village of Ide
After Morotada of the Palace Guards had drifted apart from the third daughter of Tachibana no Kinhira, he was chosen as a dancer for the festival and went out to it, and she and her sisters were there watching. When he had come home she sent him "Mukashi kite nareshi o sureru koromode o ana mezurashi to yoso ni mishi kana", and he sent back "Morotomo ni Ide no sato koso koishikere hitori ori uki yamabuki no hana", tied to a spray of yellow roses. Her answer to it is not known; but from the days when he was still visiting there is "Ōzora mo tada naranu kana kannazuki ware nomi shita ni shigure to omoeba", and another of hers, "Au koto no nami no shitagusa mikakurete shizugokoro naku ne koso nakarure". That is the whole of the section.
Tachibana no Kinhira headed the Palace Table Office, and his daughters lived at the place called Agata no Ido. The eldest served the empress under the name of the Lady Shōshō. The third was the first love of Minamoto no Saneakira in his youth, and her poems appear in the hundred and eleventh through hundred and thirteenth sections and in the hundred and sixteenth. Morotada held a third-rank post in the Palace Guards and appears in the hundred and twelfth section.
The setting is again the days when he was still visiting.
The prose records nothing further of what prompted it, saying only that this too is hers.
The section closes with it, having run from the festival poem through the yellow roses and the cold rain to this. It was later included in the Shinkokin-shū.
The word for wave in the second line is also the word for there being none, so that no meeting and the waves themselves are one word.
The grasses named grow on the bed of the water, hidden beneath those waves.
The third line means keeping herself out of sight: she is weeping where no one sees.
The word in the last line means both a root and a voice, with an emphatic construction governing the verb. Weed with no hold on the bottom and a woman crying aloud become the same thing. Waves, weed and root keep the water in view throughout, and what the poem states is weeping done in hiding.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- The village of Ide where we two were together is what I long for Bitter to break them alone these yellow roses of mine
- The wide sky itself is not as it usually is in the godless month — and I, only I, beneath it, raining my own cold rain
- It was not that I lent out my sleeves to anyone and yet at that part- ing, the unsated parting of Tanabata, they were soaked
- On the leaves of those words that bade me wait until the autumn nights came there hangs, even now, the dew — and how frail a thing it is