Watatsumi to hito ya miruramu au koto no namida o fusa ni nakitsumetsureba

English Translation

Will people take it
for the sea itself, I wonder —
since I have wept and
heaped up here so many tears
for meetings that will not come

Meaning

Will people take it for the sea itself? — since I have wept and heaped up here so many tears for meetings that will not come.

Commentary

144 This Last Setting Out

As for this Ariwara Second: perhaps because his father the Ariwara Captain had once gone down to the east, he too travelled to the provinces from time to time. Being a man of feeling, he would compose poems and write them up in places in other provinces that struck him as beautiful or affecting. The post station of Obusa stood by the sea, and he wrote up there "Watatsumi to hito ya miruramu au koto no namida o fusa ni nakitsumetsureba". At the nearby village of Minowa he composed "Itsu wa to wa wakanedo taete aki no yo zo mi no wabishisa wa shirimasarikeru". At length, having wandered through many provinces, he came to live in Kai; and there, at the point of death from illness, he composed "Karisome no yukikaiji to zo omoishi o ima wa kagiri no kadode narikeru" and died. A man who had once been with him, coming up to the capital from Mikawa, found these poems at his lodgings and knew the hand for his, and was much moved. That is the whole of the section.
The Ariwara Second is Ariwara no Shigeharu, son of the Ariwara Captain, Ariwara no Narihira; he appears in the hundred and forty-third section. Obusa and Minowa were places in the eastern provinces; Kai is what is now Yamanashi prefecture, and Mikawa the eastern part of what is now Aichi.
The setting is the post station of Obusa, a place by the sea.
What prompted the poem was his being struck by that shore. He left it written up there.
The section goes on to the poem he made at Minowa.

The first word is the sea, set down at once: the water in front of him.
What follows asks how it will look to others, in the form of a supposition.
The word for the waves also carries the sense of there being none, so that no meeting and the waves themselves stand in one word.
The word in the fourth line means in great quantity, and the place name Obusa is concealed in its syllables — the art of hiding a name inside a poem. The conceit that his heaped tears might be taken for the sea is delivered with a place name buried in it, in the manner of travel poems that work the names of places into the verse.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other