Nanigoto to ayame wa wakade kyō mo nao tamoto ni amaru ne koso taesene

English Translation

What it is about
the sweet flag does not make clear
and today as well
the roots run past my sleeve's edge
and they have not ceased at all

Meaning

I cannot tell what it is about; and today too the roots overflow my sleeve, and my weeping does not stop.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 224

Headnote: a reply.
This answers the previous poem, taking up the words for sweet flag and root and returning them with the claim that the writer is in the same case.
Murasaki Shikibu is the author of the Tale of Genji. This is her third appearance in this book, after the hundred and ninety-first and two hundred and fourth poems.
The time is the morning of the sixth day of the fifth month, as in the previous poem.
The occasion was the arrival of the root and the poem.

The first line means: what it may be about.
The word in the second line named the plant in the previous poem; here it means the sense or reason of a thing. Returning a word in a different meaning is the practice of exchange, as in the forty-ninth poem of Book One and the hundred and thirty-sixth and hundred and thirty-eighth of Book Two. The verb means to tell apart.
The third line means today as well.
The fourth line means that they will not be contained by a sleeve. Taking up the long root that was sent, it renders that length as overflowing.
The word for root at the close again carries the sound of weeping, and an emphatic particle governs the concessive form: the weeping does not cease. She answers by laying her own hardship over her friend's.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other