Mukashi kite nareshi o sureru koromode o ana mezurashi to yoso ni mishi kana

English Translation

That printed sleeve I
once knew so well, worn soft with
wearing long ago —
how strange it looked, how fine, and
I watched it as a stranger

Meaning

That printed sleeve I once knew so well, worn soft with long wearing — how strange it looked, how fine; and I watched it as a stranger would.

Commentary

113 The Village of Ide

After Morotada of the Palace Guards had drifted apart from the third daughter of Tachibana no Kinhira, he was chosen as a dancer for the festival and went out to it, and she and her sisters were there watching. When he had come home she sent him "Mukashi kite nareshi o sureru koromode o ana mezurashi to yoso ni mishi kana", and he sent back "Morotomo ni Ide no sato koso koishikere hitori ori uki yamabuki no hana", tied to a spray of yellow roses. Her answer to it is not known; but from the days when he was still visiting there is "Ōzora mo tada naranu kana kannazuki ware nomi shita ni shigure to omoeba", and another of hers, "Au koto no nami no shitagusa mikakurete shizugokoro naku ne koso nakarure". That is the whole of the section.
Tachibana no Kinhira headed the Palace Table Office, and his daughters lived at the place called Agata no Ido. The eldest served the empress under the name of the Lady Shōshō. The third was the first love of Minamoto no Saneakira in his youth, and her poems appear in the hundred and eleventh through hundred and thirteenth sections and in the hundred and sixteenth. Morotada held a third-rank post in the Palace Guards and appears in the hundred and twelfth section.
The setting is the festival, where Morotada, from whom she had drifted apart, was dancing and she and her sisters were among the onlookers.
What prompted the poem was seeing him dance. It was sent to him after she got home.
He answered with a poem of his own, and the section then turns back to poems from the days when he was still visiting.

The verb in the first line covers a robe worn soft with use and a man grown used to coming; the familiar garment and the familiar visitor stand together.
The printed sleeve is a robe with a pattern stamped on it — the costume of a festival dancer.
The exclamation in the fourth line means both how fine and how rarely seen. Calling a thing she used to see every day a rarity is how the interval between them is measured.
The closing says she watched as an outsider. The change in her position — a former lover now one of the crowd — is held in that single word.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other