Ochikochi no hitome marenaru yamazato ni ieise mu to wa omoiki ya kimi

English Translation

In a hill village
where far and near alike no
one passes — did you
ever think, in those days, that
you would make your home in it

Meaning

A hill village where, far or near, hardly anyone passes — did you ever think you would make your home there?

Commentary

57 A Hill Village Where Few Come

Taira no Nakaki, Assistant Governor of Ōmi, had doted on his daughter; but when her father died she came down in the world in various ways and was living in a poor place in another province. Taira no Kanemori, pitying her, sent her this poem. Reading it, she wept aloud and did not answer. She too, the prose concludes, was a woman of deep feeling.
Taira no Kanemori is one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he exchanges poems with the Lady of Hyōe in the fifty-sixth section and appears again in the fifty-eighth. Taira no Nakaki served as Assistant Governor of Ōmi, the second post in that province's administration. The recipient is his daughter.
The setting is the hill village in another province where she had come to live after her father's death.
What prompted the poem was Kanemori's pity for her circumstances. It was sent to her there.
Reading it, she wept aloud and sent no answer. The section closes on that and on the remark about her depth of feeling. The poem was later included in the Gosen-shū.

The first word means far and near, this side and that — a phrase that takes in the whole surrounding country and finds no one in it.
A hill village where a human figure is a rare sight measures the distance she has fallen from the household in which she was cherished.
The fourth line means to settle and keep a house somewhere.
The closing question is rhetorical: did she ever think it? She did not. It ends by addressing her directly. For a poem of sympathy it sets the contrast with her old life squarely in front of her, and that is presumably why she could not answer and wept instead.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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