Itsu wa to wa wakanedo taete aki no yo zo mi no wabishisa wa shirimasarikeru

English Translation

I could not say that
one season is worse than the
rest — and yet autumn
nights are when the bleakness of
my own case comes home to me

Meaning

I could not say that one season is worse than another; and yet autumn nights are when the bleakness of my own case comes home to me.

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 village of Minowa, near the post station of Obusa. The autumn nights tell us the season.
The prose records nothing further of what prompted it, saying only that he composed it there.
The section goes on to the poem he made at his death in Kai.

The opening declines to single out any season as worse than another.
The word that follows works as an intensifier here.
Then he singles out the autumn nights after all, with an emphatic particle governing the verb that ends the poem.
In the syllables of the phrase for his own bleakness the place name Minowa is concealed, as Obusa was in the poem before. Bleakness that ought to be the same all year comes home hardest on an autumn night — stated with a place name woven into it.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other