Suminoe ni fune sashiyoseyo wasuregusa shirushi ari ya to tsumite yukubeku - Tosa Nikki(English Translation & Meaning)

住の江に船さしよせよわすれ草
しるしありやとつみて行くべく

Roma-ji: Suminoe ni fune sashiyoseyo wasuregusa shirushi ari ya to tsumite yukubeku
English Translation: Bring the boat in close
to Suminoe's bright shore,
so I may pick there
the grass of forgetting, and
see whether it works or not
Meaning: Steer the boat to the shore of Suminoe, so I can pick the grass of forgetting and see whether it truly works.
Commentary: 44 The Fifth Day of the Second Month: The God of Sumiyoshi and the Mirror

On the fifth day of the second month, the party at last set out from Izumi-no-nada toward the anchorage of Otsu. A pine grove stretched as far as the eye could see. Everyone was suffering, and so they composed poems. Before long the master of the boat urged them to row quickly while the weather was good, and the steersman told the boatmen, "Orders from the master's boat: haul on the towropes before the morning north wind rises." His words happened to come out in thirty-one syllables, just like a poem. That day, thanks to everyone's praying all day long that the waves would not rise, neither wind nor waves arose.
On this day the mother of the lost child also composes a poem. The diary calls her "the mother of the one now gone"; she is the mother of the daughter who died in Tosa. Sumiyoshi lies around present-day Sumiyoshi Ward in Osaka, and its god was worshipped as a deity of seafaring.
As they rowed past Sumiyoshi, the mother of the lost child, unable to forget her child for even a moment of any day, composed this poem.
The diarist surmises that the mother did not truly wish to forget, but rather to rest her longing for a while so as to draw strength to long for her child again. Soon afterward a sudden wind drives the boat back, and they come to offer paper offerings and a mirror to the god of Sumiyoshi.

The first line, "Suminoe ni," means "to the shore of Sumiyoshi." The second line, "fune sashiyoseyo," is a command: steer the boat in. "Wasuregusa" in the third line is a grass said to make one forget sorrow if worn, and it was known as a specialty of Sumiyoshi.
The fourth line, "shirushi ari ya to," means "whether it has any effect," with "ya" an interrogative particle. The final line, "tsumite yukubeku," closes by giving the purpose of the command in the second line: so that I may pick it and take it along.
Like "Yosuru nami uchi mo yosenamu waga kouru hito wasuregai orite hirowamu" on the fourth day of the second month, it entrusts feeling to something said to make one forget longing. That she wishes even to test the power of the grass of forgetting shows the depth of a mother's grief at losing her child.
Author: Ki no Tsurayuki
Source: Tosa Nikki
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