Wakaruredo aimo oshimanu momoshiki o mizaramu koto no nanika kanashiki

English Translation

Though I part from you
the great palace does not grieve
to see me depart
yet that I shall see it not
why is it so sorrowful

Meaning

I am the one who leaves, and the palace does not grieve to part with me. Yet the thought that I shall never look upon it again is somehow more than I can bear.

Commentary

1 The Wall of Kokiden

The prose is very brief: as the Teiji Emperor was about to step down from the throne, Ise wrote a poem on the wall of Kokiden. That poem is this one. The emperor saw it and had a poem of his own, "Mi hitotsu ni aranu bakari o oshinabete yukimegurite mo nadoka mizaramu," written beside it. The section consists of nothing but these two poems.
The Teiji Emperor is Emperor Uda, so called because he made the Teiji palace his residence after abdicating. Ise was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tsugukage, Governor of Ise, and is counted among the thirty-six poetic immortals. She had entered service as a lady-in-waiting to Onshi, the emperor's consort, and later received the emperor's favour.
The abdication took place in the ninth year of Kanpyō, and the throne passed to his son, the Emperor Daigo. Kokiden, where the poem was written, was a hall in the women's quarters of the inner palace, and Onshi's own residence. When an emperor stepped down, his consorts and the women who served them left the palace, and for Ise it meant the end of her standing at court altogether.
Rather than address the emperor directly, she wrote on the wall of a hall — a move made in the expectation that his eye would fall on it. It did, and a reply was written there.
Both poems of the exchange were later included in the Gosen-shū. The second section then moves on to the autumn of the following year, when the retired emperor took holy orders and travelled among the mountains.

The first line concedes, against what follows, that she is the one departing. The second and third lines take that up: the word for together shows that the regret is one-sided, hers and not the palace's. The word rendered here as the great palace means, literally, a hall floored with a hundred stones, and stands for the imperial residence.
The object of her complaint is not the emperor but a building. By directing her grievance at something that cannot answer, she avoids saying anything to him directly — the same instinct that made her write on a wall rather than speak.
The lower verse looks forward, in the grammar of what has not yet happened, to a time when she will no longer see the place. The closing question asks after the sadness without accounting for it. She neither completes the reproach nor explains the grief.
Where the Tales of Ise is built as one man's life, this book sets out exchanges between named poets. What stands at its beginning is a woman's poem, and one written on a wall at that.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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