Hisakata no sora naru tsuki no mi nariseba yuku to mo miede kimi wa mitemashi

English Translation

If I were the moon
far off in the distant sky
then, unseen going
no one marking that I came
I could look on you at last

Meaning

If I had the body of the moon up in the sky, I could cross to you unnoticed, with no one to mark my coming, and look on you at last.

Commentary

20 The Katsura Princess

The Katsura Princess had set her heart on that Prince of the Ministry of Ceremonial, but he did not come to her. On a night when the moon was very beautiful she sent him a letter, and this poem was in it. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
The prince is the same one who appears through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth sections. The Katsura Princess lived at Katsura, and the prose tells us nothing more of her.
The setting is a night of very beautiful moonlight, in a period when she longed for him and he did not come.
What prompted the poem was her sending a letter on that moonlit night. The poem went with it.
The section ends with the poem; no reply from him is recorded. The same prince who had stopped visiting the Lady of Nijō in the two preceding sections here fails to answer a woman who longs for him, so that three sections in a row show the man's unfaithfulness.

The opening is a fixed epithet attached to the sky and the moon.
The second and third lines set up a condition contrary to fact — if I were the moon — which takes for granted that she is not.
The lower verse says what would follow from it. The moon crosses the sky and no one takes it amiss for going where it goes; so she could go unseen, and look on him at last.
Behind this lies the plain fact that a woman of rank could not simply go and visit a man, and that constraint is put into the form of envy for the moon. The beautiful moonlit night of the scene becomes the material of the poem itself.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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