長けくも頼みけるかな世の中を
袖になみだのかかる身をもて
袖になみだのかかる身をもて
- Roma-ji
-
Nagakeku mo tanomikeru kana yo no naka o sode ni namida no kakaru mi o mote
- English Translation
-
How long I trusted
it, this world — how long I went
on trusting, and with
a body such as this, one
the tears kept falling upon
- Meaning
- How long I trusted it, this world — and with a body like this, one the tears kept falling upon.
- Commentary
-
116 How Long I Trusted
A daughter of Tachibana no Kinhira composed this poem as she was dying. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Tachibana no Kinhira headed the Palace Table Office, and the poems of his third daughter appear in the hundred and eleventh through hundred and thirteenth sections. The daughter here is taken to be that same woman.
The setting is her deathbed; no time or place is given.
What prompted the poem was her dying. It is a poem composed at the last.
The section ends with it; no response and no later event is recorded. In the hundred and eleventh section this same daughter asked whom she was to consult about crossing the river of the parting road, and that poem and this answer to each other.
The first phrase means for a long time, with a particle of regret added to it.
What follows exclaims that she trusted; the verb means to rely on, to count on.
What she trusted was the world — a word that means the world at large and also the relations of men and women, and can be read either way.
The closing means: and with a body like this, one the tears kept falling upon. She went on trusting the world while soaked in weeping. Facing death she offers neither grievance nor prayer, and says only how she spent the years she had.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- No autumn has come no dew has settled — and yet those leaves, those words of yours, have changed their colour, changed for me, and only for me
- The dew lies so thick that I pillow my head on sleeves grown grass-like — and like the pine cricket that waits for you, I do nothing but cry
- Since long ago this heart of mine has been — and how many the grains of sand on the rough shore's beaches no one has ever counted