Wasurenamu to omou kokoro no kanashiki wa uki mo ukaranu mono ni zo arikeru

English Translation

The sorrow of a
heart set on forgetting is
such that what is hard
to bear turns out, beside it
not to be hard to bear at all

Meaning

The sorrow of a heart set on forgetting is such that what is hard to bear turns out, beside it, not to be hard at all.

Commentary

143 Grief and Not-Grief

Long ago, the son of the Ariwara Captain, known as the Ariwara Second, had a wife. She was a niece of the Middle Counsellor Yamakage and was called the Lady of Gojō. The Ariwara Second used to visit his own sister, who was married to the Governor of Ise; and the Lady of Gojō, who was the governor's concubine, he was secretly visiting himself. Thinking he was the only one, he found that a brother of his was visiting her too, and composed this poem for her. All this, the prose concludes, is now a matter of long ago.
The Ariwara Captain is Ariwara no Narihira, and the Ariwara Second is his son Ariwara no Shigeharu. The Middle Counsellor Yamakage is Fujiwara no Yamakage, and the Lady of Gojō was his niece. The Governor of Ise was married to Shigeharu's sister. A concubine of this kind was a servant with whom a man had relations.
Neither time nor place is given; only the tangle of relations around the Lady of Gojō.
What prompted the poem was his learning that a brother of his was visiting her as well. It was addressed to her.
The section ends with the poem; no reply and no later event is recorded. It was later included in the Shinchokusen-shū.

The heart in the first line is one set on forgetting, its grammar giving the resolve some force.
The sorrow of that heart is made the subject: it is the attempt to forget that is sad.
The closing says that what is hard to bear is not hard after all, with an emphatic particle governing the verb; the word for hardship can also be heard as the word for floating.
The sorrow of trying to forget is so large that other griefs shrink beside it. Not a word is said of the tangle in which a brother visits the same woman; the poem holds to the single point of a heart trying to forget, and the prose's closing remark that it is all long ago puts the rest into the past.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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