たぐへやる我が魂をいかにして
はかなき空にもて離るらむ
はかなき空にもて離るらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Tagueyaru waga tamashii o ikani shite hakanaki sora ni mote hanaruramu
- English Translation
-
This soul of mine, sent
to travel along with you
how could it be torn
away from you and left there
in the empty, fleeting sky
- Meaning
- I have sent my soul to go with you. How could it ever be pulled away from you and left adrift in that empty sky?
- Commentary
-
6 The Fleeting Sky
Captain Asatada had been going in secret to a woman who was another man's wife, and she returned his feeling; they had gone on this way for some time. Then her husband was appointed governor of a distant province, and she was to go down with him, so that both of them felt the parting without measure. On the day she left, Asatada composed this poem and sent it to her. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Captain Asatada is Fujiwara no Asatada, a son of the Middle Counsellor Fujiwara no Sadakata, and counted among the thirty-six poetic immortals. The rank he held was that of second officer in the Palace Guards. Of the woman the prose records nothing beyond the fact that she was another man's wife.
The setting is the day of her departure for the province. Her husband's provincial appointment takes her out of the capital and puts a physical end to the affair.
What prompted the poem was that departure itself. It was sent to her as she left.
The section ends with the poem; no reply from her and nothing of what became of either is recorded. The poem was later included in the Shinsenzai-shū.
The verb in the first line means to send one's own soul along with another as a companion, and rests on the belief that the soul could leave the body and wander.
Once sent, his soul is travelling with her. The question that follows asks by what means it could be done.
Read through to the last line, the question is a denial: it could not be done at all. The verb form is one of present supposition, which gives the sense of asking what is happening even now.
The empty sky is both the uncertainty of the journey and the unmoored state of a soul out of its body. It is a poem sent on the day of a parting, and what it says is that no parting is possible.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- A fine jewelled box two years its lid has not met two years apart, friend who would have thought you still wear the same vermilion as then
- Grief has worn me down and I tell myself: no more yet the one thing here that will not obey my heart is the tears that keep falling
- Our meetings, I know have come now to their last end I tell myself so and still the tears are something that will never come to end
- The way to meet you must always be blocked like this since I think of you as the god who shifts his place to somewhere new each one night