Michinoku no Adachi no yama mo morotomo ni koeba wakare no kanashikaraji o

English Translation

If we had crossed them
together, you and I — those
mountains of Adachi
in Michinoku — then this
parting would not have been sad

Meaning

If we had crossed the mountains of Adachi in Michinoku together, the parting would not have been a sad one.

Commentary

70 Station After Station

When the Lady of the Palace Guards sent arbutus fruit to Tadafumi, who had gone down east, she worked the name of the fruit into the poem "Michinoku no Adachi no yama mo morotomo ni koeba wakare no kanashikaraji o". She was living in the house by the embankment, and when she caught sweetfish and sent them she composed "Kamogawa no se ni fusu ayu no io torite nede koso akase yume ni mietsu ya". After the man had gone down to Michinoku he sent several affectionate letters by messenger; then word came that he had fallen ill on the road and died, and she was overcome with grief. After she had heard this, a letter of his, written with great feeling, was brought to her by a messenger from the post station at Shinozuka. She was much distressed and asked when it had been written; the messenger said it had been a long while in coming. She then composed "Shinozuka no umaya umaya to machiwabishi kimi wa munashiku nari zo shinikeru", and wept. The man who had died had been admitted to court service as a boy, under the childhood name Daishichi; on coming of age he served in the chamberlains' office, and had gone to Michinoku in his father's train, with the additional charge of conveying gold to the capital. That is the whole of the section.
Fujiwara no Tadafumi had gone down to Michinoku as commander of the expedition and appears in the sixty-ninth section. The man attached to the Lady of the Palace Guards was his son, who composes the poem about the hunting robe there. She appears repeatedly in this book; the tenth section tells how she sold the house by the embankment and moved to Awata. Shinozuka was a post station on the road east.
The setting is after the party had gone down east, at the time she sent the arbutus fruit.
What prompted the poem was that gift. The prose notes that she worked the fruit's name into the verse, using the art of hiding a name inside a poem.
A second poem, sent with sweetfish, follows in the same section, and the section goes on from there to the news of his death.

The mountains of Adachi in Michinoku were a place of poetic association, appearing also in the Kurozuka poem of the fifty-eighth section. They stand here as a stage on the road east.
The opening lines conceal, in their syllables, the name of the fruit she sent — the art of hiding a name inside a poem, which the prose itself points out.
The third line sets up the condition: if the two of them had crossed together. That they could not is the premise.
The closing says the parting would not have been sad, in the grammar of what will not be, and breaks off on a particle of regret. The whole of her position — a woman who cannot go — is put into the crossing of a mountain.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other