Tsumorikeru toshi no ayame mo omōezu kyō mo suginuru kokoro miyureba

English Translation

The pattern of these
piled-up years is past my telling;
for I can see the
heart that lets even this day
go by, and pass, like the rest.

Meaning

The pattern of these piled-up years is past my telling; for I can see the heart that lets even this day go by like the rest.

Commentary

78 The Fifth Month: Exchanges on the Cuckoo and the Sweet Flag

The fifth month came. Michitsuna sent the woman a poem on the cuckoo, and she answered it. Then on the fifth day of the fifth month, the festival of the sweet flag, he sent another on that plant, and again she answered.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son, nineteen that year. The woman is the one the text calls the Yamato-seeming person, and she is unnamed. The fifth day of the fifth month is the festival at which sweet flag is hung under the eaves and scented balls are put up.
It is the fifth day of the fifth month of the first year of Tenen, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
It answers Michitsuna's poem, which reckoned the length of the years by the number of times this festival had come and gone.
After this exchange, and passing over Kaneie's request for a matching poem, the account moves to the move to Nakagawa in the eighth month.

She takes back his years and his sweet flag. The opening means piled up, receiving the reckoning he had made. The word in the second line names the sweet flag and also the pattern or distinction of things, and on it the poem turns: the flag of the accumulated years and the sense one might make of those years are held together, so that the reply is that she cannot tell how far they have piled at all. The same pivot was used in the first book by Kaneie, at "Kakurenu ni ouru kazu o ba tare ka shiru ayame shirazu mo mataru naru kana," and in the second by the author, at "Yo no naka ni aru waga mi ka wa wabinureba sara ni ayame mo shirarezarikeri"; it recurs throughout the diary. The third means that it does not come to her, that she cannot make it out. The close means that she can see the heart which lets even this day pass — a hit at a man who lets even the festival go by in the ordinary way, so that his years are not worth counting. To one who has counted, she answers that the counting has no point.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other