あかつきは鳴くゆふつけのわび声に
おとらぬ音をぞなきてかへりし
おとらぬ音をぞなきてかへりし
- Roma-ji
-
Akatsuki wa naku yūtsuke no wabigoe ni otoranu ne o zo nakite kaerishi
- English Translation
-
At daybreak I went
home, and I cried as I went
with a voice no less
forlorn than the cock's own cry
the cock with the mulberry cord
- Meaning
- At daybreak I went home, crying as I went, with a voice no less forlorn than the crying of the cock.
- Commentary
-
119 No Voice but the Bird's
To the same woman as in the previous section, Fujiwara no Saneki, once Governor of Michinoku and now dead, sent a poem. This was when his illness had grown grave and had then eased a little. He sent "Karakushite oshimitometaru inochi mote au koto o sae yamamu to ya suru", and her reply was "Morotomo ni iza to wa iwade Shide no yama nadoka wa hitori koemu to wa seshi". But on the night he went to her he could not see her, some obstacle perhaps having arisen; and the next morning, having gone home, he sent "Akatsuki wa naku yūtsuke no wabigoe ni otoranu ne o zo nakite kaerishi", and her reply was "Akatsuki no nezame no mimi ni kikishikado tori yori hoka no koe wa sezariki". That is the whole of the section.
Fujiwara no Saneki served as Governor of Michinoku. The woman is the Elder Lady of Kan'in of the hundred and eighteenth section. That these poems appear in the personal collection of Minamoto no Saneakira is thought to be a confusion arising from the similarity of the two men's names.
The setting is the morning after he went to her. The night before, some obstacle perhaps having arisen, he had not been able to see her and had gone home.
What prompted the poem was that failure. It was sent the next morning.
She answered with a poem of her own, and that reply closes the hundred and nineteenth section.
Daybreak here is the dark hour before dawn, long the hour at which lovers part in poetry.
The bird named is the cock hung with mulberry cord, a bird that crows at that hour.
Its cry is called forlorn, and he sets his own weeping beside it.
The closing says he wept no less loudly as he went home, with an emphatic particle governing the verb. Claiming to have outdone the cock is how he states his grief at not seeing her — and that claim is exactly what her reply denies.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- With this life of mine that I have barely managed to hold on to, would you put an end to even our meeting, on top of that
- Without so much as saying, come, let us go to- gether — why did you mean to cross that mountain of the dead, and cross it alone
- I heard with the ears of one woken at daybreak and what I heard was nothing — no voice at all there but the voice of the bird itself
- Late or early, they have bloomed at last, these blossoms of the plum — and whose hand was it, I wonder, that put the seed into the ground