Iwade omou zo iu ni masareru

English Translation

What is thought and not
spoken — that is the greater
by far, and I say
nothing: not of Iwate
not of the bird, nothing more

Meaning

What is thought and not spoken is the greater by far. Of Iwate, of the bird, I say nothing.

Commentary

152 Unspoken

The same emperor at Nara was fond of hunting, and had a hawk sent from Iwate trained to the wrist and called it Iwate. He entrusted it to a Major Counsellor who had experience of hawking, and somehow the bird was lost. The man searched frantically and could not find it; and when several days had passed and it could no longer be concealed, he told the emperor, who said nothing. He told him again, and again there was no answer. Shaking with a fear that made him hardly himself, he repeated that the hawk was gone and begged for instructions; and the emperor said only this and nothing else, so deeply, it seems, did he feel the loss. People afterwards added opening lines of their own and made poems of it, but in fact he spoke only the closing lines.
The emperor at Nara appears in the hundred and fiftieth and hundred and fifty-first sections. Iwate is a place in Michinoku. Of the Major Counsellor the prose says only that he had experience of hawking.
The setting is the palace, with the Major Counsellor repeatedly asking for instructions after losing the bird entrusted to him.
What prompted the words was that questioning. The emperor said nothing else at all.
The prose records that people afterwards supplied opening lines and made poems of it, but that in fact only the closing lines were spoken. The section ends on that explanation.

This is not a complete poem but the closing seven-seven alone — a rare instance in this book of something that does not take the form of a verse.
The first word means both saying nothing and the name of the hawk, Iwate, so that keeping silent and thinking of the bird are one word.
An emphatic particle governs the verb that ends it.
The closing says that the unspoken is the greater. To a man begging for instructions, the answer is that there is nothing to say. Silence is itself the reply — and that the lines came down without an opening verse is of a piece with what they say.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other