さす竹の世隠りてあれ我が背子が
我がりし来ずは我れ恋めやも
我がりし来ずは我れ恋めやも
- Roma-ji
-
Sasutake no yogomorite are waga seko ga wagari shi kozu wa are koime yamo
- English Translation
-
Like the sprouting bamboo,
stay hidden within your walls;
if you, my dearest,
had never come to my side,
would I ever pine like this
- Meaning
- Stay hidden within your house, like the bamboo's closed joints. If you, my dear, had never come to me, would I suffer so from love?
- Commentary
-
Book Eleven Love Poems Ancient and Modern I 2773
Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Expressing Feelings through Things"
If you had never come to me, I would not suffer so from love, so you might as well stay shut up at home: so a woman, in the pain of love, reproaches her man. Though she says she wishes he would not come, she is in fact confessing how deep her love has grown, and therein lies the poem's subtle twist of feeling.
It is a poem on bamboo, matching the closed hollow within a bamboo joint to the idea of shutting oneself away from others' eyes. The sequence moves here from poems on sedge to a poem on bamboo.
The author is unknown. The anonymous poems of Book Eleven gather the love poems of people whose names have not come down to us.
First line, "sasutake no": a pillow word attaching to "yo" (world), since the joint of bamboo is called "yo." As befits its category, the poem sets the image of bamboo at its head.
Second line, "yogomorite are": "stay hidden away from the world." "Are" is the imperative of "ari," with a pause here.
Third line, "waga seko ga": "my dear one." "Seko" is a woman's affectionate word for her husband or lover, marking the poem as a woman's.
Fourth line, "wagari shi kozu wa": "if you had not come to me." "Gari" means "to the place of," "shi" is emphatic, and "zu wa" expresses a negative supposition.
Fifth line, "are koime yamo": "would I ever suffer from love? Surely not." "Me yamo" is the realis "me" of the conjectural "mu" with the rhetorical "ya" and exclamatory "mo," ending by blaming the beloved for her pain.
- Source
- Manyoshu
- Prev Poem
-
Mano no ike no kosuge o kasa ni nuwazushite hito no tōna o tatsu beki mono ka
- Next Poem
-
Kamunabi no asaji no hara no uruwashimi a ga omou kimi ga koe no shirukeku