Tayu to ieba ito zo kanashiki kimi ni yori onaji tsukasa ni kuru kai mo naku

English Translation

To hear you say it
has ceased is a thread of grief;
and all through your good
offices I came to that
same office — to no purpose.

Meaning

To hear you say it has ceased is a grief drawn out like thread; and it was through you that I came to that same office — to no purpose at all.

Commentary

14 Kaneie's Friendship with Prince Akiakira

On the fifth of the seventh month, while the author was shut in for a long period of abstinence, word came from Kaneie that the day after next would be the meeting slope. She answered with a poem, and — whether he thought the tone had altered — Kaneie seemed to take a little more notice of her, and the months went by so. The woman of Machi no Kōji, whom she had found insufferable, was now, she heard, a laughing-stock, and that eased her mind. As for what had gone before, there was nothing to be done: hard as it was, it must be the poverty of her own destiny, she told herself, turning the matter over this way and that as the time passed. Kaneie, after his years as lesser counselor, rose to the fourth rank, left the privy chamber, and at the appointments received an office not to his liking. He seemed to find the world thoroughly distasteful, and since he went nowhere but on his rounds of visits, he would spend two or three days quite at leisure. About that time a poem came from the Prince who was head of that unwelcome office, and Kaneie answered it; three exchanges passed between them on the figure of thread. Later, from about the twentieth of the fifth month, the author moved to the place she had used before in order to avoid a period of mourning, and the Prince had moved to a house separated from hers by only a fence. Rain fell heavily into the sixth month, and everyone must have been shut in by it; her own lodging being a poor one, there was a commotion over the leaking roof, and a poem came from the Prince. Exchanges on the long rains and the muddy road of love followed, and after them others on the pink and the shore plover.
Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke, and by this time had passed his years as lesser counselor and risen to the fourth rank; he would rise to be regent and chancellor. The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The Prince is the head of the office in which Kaneie served as deputy; the text gives no name, and he is taken to be Prince Akiakira. The woman of Machi no Kōji likewise appears under that name only.
It is the Ōwa era, and the places are the author's dwelling and the Prince's residence.
It answers the Prince's question as to how his coming could have ceased now that they were of one office.
The Prince pressed further with "Natsuhiki no ito kotowari ya futame mime yori ariku ma ni hodo no furu kamo," and the exchange went on.

He takes back the office, the reeling and the ceasing, all of them. The opening receives the Prince's closing line unchanged. In the second line the word for very also means thread, so that he keeps to the ground the Prince had laid. The third line means: through you — that is, it was by the Prince's favor that he was posted to the same bureau, a compliment. The fourth answers the line about their becoming one office. The verb at the close carries the same double sense of reeling and coming, so that his coming has been to no purpose. The man reproached takes up every one of the words used against him and turns them into a grief of his own — a piece of banter properly mindful of the difference in their rank.

Author

Fujiwara no Kaneie

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other