Omou koto sashite sore to wa naki mono o aki no yūbe o kokoro ni zo tou

English Translation

There is nothing I
can point to and say, that is
the thing that troubles
and yet I put to my heart
the question of autumn's dusk

Meaning

There is nothing I could point to and name as what troubles me; and still I put the autumn evening as a question to my own heart.

Commentary

Book Four Autumn Poems I 365

Headnote: composed as an autumn poem.
The ninth poem on the autumn evening. Unable to name what the brooding is about, the poet puts the question to herself. The headnote gives autumn as the occasion.
Kunaikyo was a lady-in-waiting to Retired Emperor Go-Toba and died young. In Book One she is the poet of the fourth and seventy-sixth poems, in Book Two of the hundred and twenty-eighth and others, and in Book Three of the two hundred and eighty-first.
The time is an autumn evening; no place is given.
The occasion was the writing of an autumn poem.

The first line names the subject.
The second line means: pointing and saying, this is it. What the brooding is about cannot be identified. It is the idea of Sanesada's three hundred and fourth poem, where the tears had no nameable cause; there it was the tears and here the brooding.
The particle in the third line is concessive and exclamatory: and yet it is so.
The fourth line names the object. Elsewhere in this run the autumn evening stands at the close; here it comes in the fourth line and another phrase ends the poem.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close. The question is put not outward but to the poet's own heart, as Yoshitsune's three hundred and fifty-ninth poem questioned itself through a rhetorical negative: self-interrogation recurs through this run.

Author

Kunaikyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other