Iu yori mo kiku zo kanashiki shikishima no yo ni furusato no hito ya mo ni nari

English Translation

Sadder than the one
who speaks is the one who hears.
And what has become
of her, grown old in this world,
the woman of that old home?

Meaning

Sadder than the one who speaks is the one who hears. And what has become of her, grown old in this world, the woman of that old home?

Commentary

54 The Retreat at Narutaki

On the fourth of the sixth month, setting out before Kaneie's period of abstinence was over, she went to the temple at Narutaki in the western hills and shut herself up there. Kaneie came to fetch her and she would not go; letters passed, and life at the mountain temple went on. Her sister visited, Kaneie's messenger came, she hardened a sorrowful resolve, and another letter came from him. Letters of inquiry arrived one after another, and though she answered them the next day, the time went by while she turned over such thoughts as that she did not mean to stay shut up forever. She put that state of mind into a poem and sent it to one who had written. An answer came. Then, to the gentlewomen on night duty, someone who had once served in that office sent a poem, saying that they too must be attending their mistress with heavy hearts, and that there is a poem about how high and low alike have their risings and fallings. Hearing of it from the woman, the author told her to answer quickly, and she replied that seeing their mistress holding back her tears made them all wretched. Later a relative came to call, and the next day sent the things needed for a long stay away from home, adding that it must have been hard to come all that way to a mountain temple, with two poems. The author wrote back with great care and returned two poems of her own. Afterward letters passed with Tōshi, and a poem came also from an ascetic of the temple who had crossed the Ōmine range from Mitake to Kumano. In time Michitaka called, her father Tomoyasu came for her, and at last she came down from the mountain when Kaneie came to fetch her.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Kaneie was the third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke and would rise to be regent and chancellor. Narutaki is a place in the western hills of the capital, where the temple stood. The one who sent the letter of inquiry, the former attendant on night duty, the gentlewoman, the relative and the ascetic are none of them named in the text.
It is the sixth month of the second year of Tenroku, and the places are the capital and the mountain temple at Narutaki.
It answers the author's poem saying that she had never imagined she would add her own voice to the evening bell.
After this exchange the account moves to the poem sent by a former attendant to the gentlewomen on night duty.

The first two lines mean that the one who hears is sadder than the one who speaks, the emphatic particle deepening the sorrow. To a woman writing of the loneliness of her retreat, the answer puts first the pain of the listener; it is less consolation than a declaration that the grief is shared. The third line is the fixed epithet for Yamato, and it draws out the world of the fourth line as the world of this country. In that line the verb means both to pass one's years and to grow old, and joined to the word for one's old home it calls up the house in the capital where she had long lived. To someone who has gone up a mountain, the reply produces the house left behind: she wrote of a mountain bell, and it turns her toward the capital. The closing line is disturbed in the base text and its reading is not settled, though it is understood as asking what will become of the woman of that home.

Source

Kagero Nikki

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