謗者任汝謗 嗤者任汝嗤 soshiru mono wa nanji no soshiru ni makasu, warau mono wa nanji no warau ni makasu Those Who Slander, I Leave You to Your Slandering; Those Who Sneer, I Leave You to Your Sneering

謗 (read soshiru) is to slander, to speak ill of another. 嗤 (read warau) is to sneer, to laugh at someone. 任 (read makasu) is to leave to, to let someone do as they wish. 汝 (read nanji) is you. In the reading our history signs, the line also takes wa, no and ni, which the characters do not write.

The poem opens on rain and wind, and stubborn dogs barking in packs: this too is an ordinary thing. Its last line says the poet does not seek to be known by other men.

Shōzan was a scholar who studied under Satō Issai. In 1854 he was caught up in his pupil Yoshida Shōin's failed attempt to go abroad, and was confined for nine years. He was killed in Kyoto in 1864.

Sakuma Shōzan's book of poems and prose sets twelve poems after its prose, and they open with two written in prison. The pages our history read give this poem no date of its own.

By the 106-rhyme table, the poem as printed in 1871 changes rhyme where the couplet begins. By the snippets of the National Diet Library's full-text index, some later books call its last four lines a quatrain.

A martial-arts manual of 1895 sets the couplet, credited to Shōzan, beside a line it credits to Nanshū, a pen name of Saigō Takamori. It offers the two as the spirit of standing alone and walking alone. Without that spirit, it says, we are shaken when we meet the thrusts of others.

In 1915 Kanno Dōmei printed the poem's last four lines in an anthology and read them by Shōzan's life. Kanno writes that when the cry to close the country was loud, Shōzan alone argued for opening it. He adds that the blame and scorn of the world gathered on Shōzan, and that he fell to an assassin.

Kanno says the four lines have the sense of Confucius' saying it is heaven that knows me. In the Analects, it follows I do not resent heaven, I do not blame men.

Our history reads the couplet as a release more than a defiance. It leaves the slanderers their slander, and the last two lines say why that costs the poet nothing: heaven knows him. The English title is our history's own rendering.

Lines 5 and 6 of 漫述, a poem of eight five-character lines by 佐久間象山 (1811–1864), printed as the last of twelve poems in his 『省諐録』 (1871), a book the 世界大百科 dates to 1854 and describes as his feelings in the Edo prison written down after his release, and in the 『象山先生詩鈔』 (1878); the last four lines are printed alone under the same title from 1878.