いのちだにこころに叶ふものならば
なにか別れの悲しからまし
なにか別れの悲しからまし
- Roma-ji
-
Inochi dani kokoro ni kanau mono naraba nanika wakare no kanashikaramashi
- English Translation
-
If only our lives
were ours to command — if life
at least obeyed us
then why should any parting
be a sorrowful thing at all
- Meaning
- If only our lives were ours to command, why should any parting be a sorrowful thing?
- Commentary
-
145 The Plover of the Shore
When the retired Emperor Uda, then in holy orders, was staying at Kawajiri, there was a woman of pleasure called Shiro. She was sent for and came and waited on him; and since there were many nobles and princes present she kept to the lower seats, far off. Asked why she stayed so far away, and told to answer in a poem, she composed "Hamachidori tobiyuku kagiri arikereba kumo tatsu yama o awa to koso mire", and the retired emperor praised it and gave her a reward. The poem "Inochi dani kokoro ni kanau mono naraba nanika wakare no kanashikaramashi" is also hers. That is the whole of the section.
The retired Emperor Uda appears in the first and second sections as the Teiji Emperor. Kawajiri lay near the mouth of the Yodo river and was known as a place where women of pleasure gathered. Shiro was one of them.
Neither time nor place is given. All we are told is that this poem too is hers.
The prose records nothing of what prompted it.
The section closes with it. An improvisation is followed by a poem of feeling, the same arrangement as with the Lady of Higaki in the hundred and twenty-sixth through hundred and twenty-eighth sections. This poem was later included in the Kokin-shū.
The opening is a condition contrary to fact, with a particle meaning at the very least: if life alone were ours to command.
If it were, one could meet again — and that premise carries into the lower verse.
The closing question is rhetorical: why should parting be sad? It would not be.
Since life is not ours to command, partings are sad. By setting up a supposition and closing it with a rhetorical question, the poem leaves the unstated fact standing on its own. It is placed here to show that a woman skilled at improvising was equally skilled at this.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- A road for going and coming back, I thought it — no more than that, a borrowed road. And it turns out this was my last setting out
- A plover of the shore can fly only so far and no further — so I look at that cloud-crowned mountain from here, and say: ah, there it is
- Pale green, and worth the meeting — this spring I have met and though I am not the haze itself, I too have risen, and stand here at last
- I am worn out with living. I shall throw myself in. The Ikuta — the river of life, in Tsu — was nothing but a name, then