Yūgure no nagare kuruma o matsu hodo ni namida ōi no kawa to koso nare

English Translation

At dusk I wait for
the carriage flowing toward me,
and in that waiting
my tears have swollen until
they are the Ōi river.

Meaning

While I wait at dusk for the carriage that comes flowing toward me, my tears have grown into the river Ōi.

Commentary

3 The Marriage to Kaneie Is Settled

Letters came from Kaneie again and again, and still the author did not answer. Her father Tomoyasu said it was a presumption to leave him waiting and that a proper reply ought to be sent, so he had a suitable person write one on her behalf. Kaneie took this in earnest and was delighted, and letters passed frequently between the houses; but he complained that the hand was not hers and asked repeatedly for an answer written by the lady herself. Each time, the household put him off with another substitute's hand, and the months went by in nothing but formal correspondence. Autumn came, and through the exchange of poems the two were drawn on toward marriage.
Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke and at this time Assistant Commander of the Right Guards; he would rise to be regent and chancellor. The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu, a man of the provincial governor class who would go down to Mutsu as its governor at the end of this year.
It is autumn in the eighth year of Tenryaku, and the place is the residence of the author's father Tomoyasu.
Earnest letters had passed between them many times, and the narrative records only that it was on some morning or other that this poem arrived.
The author answered with "Omou koto ōi no kawa no yūgure wa kokoro ni mo arazu nagare koso sure."

The opening fixes the hour of waiting at dusk. The word in the second line means both the interval until a thing comes and a carriage, so that waiting for the time of meeting and waiting for the vehicle of a visit are held together at once. The word for flowing placed before it belongs to the same family as river and as the verb of the reply, and lends the sense of time running on. The fourth line joins the idea of many tears to the name of the river, making a pivot word the axis of the whole construction. The close is bound by an emphatic particle and declares outright that the tears have become the river itself. Turning the length of a wait into a quantity of tears is a habit of thought widely found in the exchange poetry of this period.

Author

Fujiwara no Kaneie

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other