いかなればかつがつものを思ふらむ
名残もなくぞわれは悲しき
名残もなくぞわれは悲しき
- Roma-ji
-
Ikanareba katsugatsu mono o omouramu nagori mo naku zo ware wa kanashiki
- English Translation
-
How is it that you
can brood over this and that
by halves — for my part
there is nothing left of me
nothing over: I am grief
- Meaning
- How is it that you can brood over this and that by halves? For my part there is nothing left over at all: I am grief itself.
- Commentary
-
122 Half and Half
When Toshiko went on pilgrimage to Shiga temple she met a priest called Zōki and spent a night with him. They took a room in the bridge pavilion and made all manner of promises to each other. As she was leaving, word came from Zōki: "Aimite wa wakaruru koto no nakariseba katsugatsu mono wa omowazaramashi". Toshiko's reply was "Ikanareba katsugatsu mono o omouramu nagori mo naku zo ware wa kanashiki". That is the whole of the section.
Toshiko was the wife of Fujiwara no Chikane; she is entrusted with the offerings in the third section, composes a poem of condolence in the ninth, and dies in the thirteenth. She is one of the four gathered in the forty-first section and has poems in the sixty-sixth through sixty-eighth. Zōki was a priest, who appears again in the hundred and twenty-third section. Shiga temple stood in Ōmi province.
The setting is the same, as she was leaving Shiga.
What prompted it is his, "Aimite wa wakaruru koto no nakariseba katsugatsu mono wa omowazaramashi", about brooding over this and that.
This reply closes the hundred and twenty-second section. The prose passes no judgement; the section consists of the exchange alone. It was later included in the Shinshokukokin-shū.
The opening asks how it can be so, putting a question to what he has said.
She takes over his word for moderate brooding and asks where he finds the leisure for it.
What she calls a remainder is anything left over; there is not even that much of her left, with an emphatic particle governing the adjective that ends the poem.
He used a word of degree, and she answers that her grief admits of no degree. Attacking the other's very choice of word is a note that recurs in the women's poems in this book.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- A thousand voices — is it only words you blow What I do not hear is the flute called Kochiku, whose very name says: come this way
- If it were not that meeting must be followed by parting, I would not be brooding over this and that, half of one thing, half another
- Is it because this body of mine is a drop of dew on a leaf that the least movement of the heart sends the tears running down
- In the fields of spring the sanekazura shines out green among the rest and so I would have you first of all — what do you say to it