Kakurenishi tsuki wa megurite idekuredo kage ni mo hito wa miezu zo arikeru

English Translation

The moon that was hid
has come round and risen a-
gain — and even in
its light, in all that light, she
is nowhere to be seen now

Meaning

The moon that was hidden has come round and risen again; and even in its light she is nowhere to be seen.

Commentary

97 The Moon Comes Round Again

When a year had passed since the death of the wife of the Chancellor Fujiwara no Tadahira, and preparations for the memorial service were under way, the moon was very beautiful; and he went out onto the verandah and, thinking over many things, composed this poem. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Fujiwara no Tadahira rose to Chancellor; the Morotada of the ninety-fourth section and the Saneyori of the ninety-sixth were his sons. The lady was his principal wife.
The setting is the verandah of his house, on a moonlit night during the preparations for the first anniversary.
What prompted the poem was looking at that moon: a moon come round again on the anniversary of her death.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded. The ninety-eighth section gives another account of Tadahira mourning. This poem was later included in the Shokugosen-shū.

The moon of the first line is one that had been hidden; the moon waxes and wanes, and having gone it comes round and rises again.
The concessive marks the turn: it has come back, and yet. A first anniversary is a year come round to the same day, and the moon's circuit is laid over it.
The word in the fourth line means light and also a person's figure, so that in the light of the moon the one that light used to fall on is not there.
The closing, with an emphatic particle governing its verb, sets what returns beside what does not. It rests on the same thought as the poem of the seventy-first section about flowers that scatter and bloom again.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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