Ayame kari kimi wa numa ni zo madoikeru ware wa no ni idete karu zo wabishiki

English Translation

Cutting sweet flag, you
must have wandered lost about
the marshes — while I
went out into the fields to
cut, and to hunt, and it was hard

Meaning

Cutting sweet flag, you must have wandered about the marshes; while I went out into the fields to cut — and to hunt — and it was hard going.

Commentary

164 The Decorated Rice-Cake

Someone sent Captain Ariwara a decorated rice-cake, and in reply he sent this poem, together with a pheasant. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Captain Ariwara is Ariwara no Narihira, who appears in the hundred and sixty-first through hundred and sixty-third sections and whose death is told in the hundred and sixty-fifth. The decorated rice-cake was a sweetmeat dressed with sweet flag for the festival of the fifth day of the fifth month. Of the sender the prose says only that it was someone.
The setting is the season of that festival, as the rice-cake shows.
What prompted the poem was the gift. It went back as a return, with a pheasant.
The section ends with the poem and the note about the pheasant.

Cutting sweet flag is what one does for the festival decorations, and it grows in marshy water. The dressing on the gift becomes the subject of the poem.
The second line grants that the sender must have wandered the marshes for it, with an emphatic particle governing the verb: the trouble taken is acknowledged first.
The verb in the fourth line means both to cut grass and to hunt game, so that where the sender cut in the marsh, he went into the fields to hunt. The act of sending a pheasant in return is folded into that one word.
The closing says the cutting was hard. Marsh against field, cutting against hunting, the other's labour against his own: the return of a gift is made in verse.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other