Kaku bakari koitsutsu arazu wa takayama no iwane shi makite shinamashi mono o

かくばかり恋ひつつあらずは高山の
磐根しまきて死なましものを

Roma-ji: Kaku bakari koitsutsu arazu wa takayama no iwane shi makite shinamashi mono o
English Translation: Rather than go on
longing for you as I do,
I would sooner have
pillowed my head on the rocks
of some high mountain and died.
Meaning: Rather than go on longing for you like this, I would sooner have laid my head upon the rocks of some high mountain and died.
Commentary: Book Two Love Poems 86

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Four poems composed by Empress Iwa no Hime in longing for the Emperor"
Unable to bear the pain of longing, the speaker voices a violent wish to die instead. Turning sharply from the hesitation of the first poem, this one measures the suffering of love against death itself.
This is the second of the four poems Empress Iwa no Hime composed in longing for Emperor Nintoku; the authorship follows the headnote of the sequence.
The author, Empress Iwa no Hime, was the daughter of Katsuragi no Sotsuhiko and the consort of Emperor Nintoku. The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki portray her as a fiercely jealous empress. The poems in this sequence are thought to have been composed by later poets and attributed to her.

The first line, "kaku bakari," means "this much," stressing the depth of her anguish.
In the second line, "koitsutsu arazu wa," tsutsu marks continuation and zu wa means "rather than go on doing so," answering the mashi of the final line. The same phrase is used in 115 by Princess Tajima and in 120 by Prince Yuge in this book.
The third line, "takayama no," means "of a high mountain." It modifies the rocks that follow and points to a place far from human dwellings.
In the fourth line, "iwane shi makite," iwane are great rocks rooted in the earth, shi is an intensifying particle, and maku means to use as a pillow. Dying with one's head on a mountain rock suggests a death by the roadside. The phrase echoes "iwane shi makeru" in 223 by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, forming an inverted pair: a wish to die for love and an actual death.
In the final line, "shinamashi mono o," mashi is the counterfactual auxiliary and mono o an exclamation of regret: if only I had died.
Author: Empress Iwa no Hime
Source: Manyoshu
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