Mi mo mizu mo tare to shirite ka koiraruru obotsukanami no kyō no nagame ya

English Translation

Seen or not seen — and
knowing me for whom, is it
that you say you long
A day of gazing out, this
and nothing certain in it

Meaning

Seen or not seen — and knowing me for whom, do you say you long? A day of gazing out, and nothing certain in it.

Commentary

166 The Carriage of Good Appearance

Captain Ariwara went out to see a procession and stopped beside a carriage of good appearance in which a woman was sitting. Through the gap in the under-blind he saw her face very clearly, and they exchanged some words. Both went home, and in the morning he sent her "Mizu mo arazu mi mo senu hito no koishiki wa ayanaku kyō ya nagame kurasamu". Her reply was "Mi mo mizu mo tare to shirite ka koiraruru obotsukanami no kyō no nagame ya". These are tales, the prose concludes, and such things happen in the world.
Captain Ariwara is Ariwara no Narihira, who appears through the hundred and sixty-first to hundred and sixty-fourth sections and whose death is told in the hundred and sixty-fifth. The occasion is the watching of a procession. The under-blind was a cloth hung inside the blinds of an ox-carriage to screen those within. Of the woman the prose tells us nothing.
The setting is the same morning, when his poem reached her.
What prompted it is his, "Mizu mo arazu mi mo senu hito no koishiki wa ayanaku kyō ya nagame kurasamu", about longing for one neither seen nor unseen.
This reply closes the hundred and sixty-sixth section. The prose ends by remarking that these are tales, and that such things happen.

The opening compresses his double negative into a shorter form and hands it back.
What follows asks whom he takes her for; the passive marks her as the one longed for. She answers from a position of not knowing that her face was seen at all.
The word in the fourth line means indistinct, not to be relied on, and its grammar marks it as the cause; it also answers his word for what is without reason.
The poem ends on the day's brooding, named and left standing. He said he would spend the day gazing; she answers that it is a gazing with nothing certain in it. Reusing the other's words and turning their sense is a pattern that recurs throughout this book.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other