Aki no no o irodoru kaze wa fukinu tomo kokoro wa kareji kusaba naraneba

English Translation

Though the wind that gives
the autumn fields their colour
blows, my heart will not
wither, will not turn away
not being a blade of grass

Meaning

Though the wind that colours the autumn fields may blow, my heart will not wither and will not turn away, not being a blade of grass.

Commentary

160 The Purification Wand

While Captain Ariwara — that is, Ariwara no Narihira — was visiting the same Handmaid of Somedono, she sent him "Akihagi o irodoru kaze no fukinureba hito no kokoro mo utagawarekeri", and he answered "Aki no no o irodoru kaze wa fukinu tomo kokoro wa kareji kusaba naraneba". Later, when he had stopped coming, a robe was sent from him with word that he had no one even to wash it for him and would be grateful for her help; so she said that this was surely his own doing, and sent "Ōnusa ni narinuru hito no kanashiki wa yoruse to mo naku shika zo nakunaru". His reply was "Nagaru tomo nani to ka miemu te ni torite hikikemu hito zo nusa to shiruramu". That is the whole of the section.
Captain Ariwara is Ariwara no Narihira, counted among the six poetic geniuses; his son Ariwara no Shigeharu appears in the hundred and forty-third and hundred and forty-fourth sections. The Handmaid of Somedono appears in the hundred and fifty-ninth. The great purification wand was a large staff of paper streamers, touched by many hands in the rite and then set adrift on a river.
The setting is the same autumn, when her poem reached him.
What prompted it is hers, "Akihagi o irodoru kaze no fukinureba hito no kokoro mo utagawarekeri", with its doubt about his heart.
The section then moves to the exchange after his visits ceased. This poem too was later included in the Gosen-shū.

He takes her words over into his own opening, widening the bush clover to the whole autumn field and starting from the same wind.
The concessive in the third line grants the wind: let it blow.
The verb that follows means both to wither and to grow distant, so that a heart not withering and a heart not turning away are one word; the ending denies it as something that will not be.
The closing gives the reason: he is not a blade of grass. What the wind discolours is vegetation, not people. She applied a law of nature to a person, and he answers that a person is not a plant — the same construction as the exchange about the grass of forgetting in the sixteenth section.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other