Mizu mo arazu mi mo senu hito no koishiki wa ayanaku kyō ya nagame kurasamu

English Translation

Not that I did not
see you, nor that I saw you —
and longing for one
seen so, shall I spend today
gazing out, and to no purpose

Meaning

Not that I did not see you, nor that I saw you; and longing for someone seen so, shall I spend today gazing out to no purpose?

Commentary

166 The Carriage of Good Appearance

Captain Ariwara went out to see a procession and stopped beside a carriage of good appearance in which a woman was sitting. Through the gap in the under-blind he saw her face very clearly, and they exchanged some words. Both went home, and in the morning he sent her "Mizu mo arazu mi mo senu hito no koishiki wa ayanaku kyō ya nagame kurasamu". Her reply was "Mi mo mizu mo tare to shirite ka koiraruru obotsukanami no kyō no nagame ya". These are tales, the prose concludes, and such things happen in the world.
Captain Ariwara is Ariwara no Narihira, who appears through the hundred and sixty-first to hundred and sixty-fourth sections and whose death is told in the hundred and sixty-fifth. The occasion is the watching of a procession. The under-blind was a cloth hung inside the blinds of an ox-carriage to screen those within. Of the woman the prose tells us nothing.
The setting is the procession, where he stopped by her carriage, saw her through the gap in the under-blind, and exchanged words.
What prompted the poem was the morning after they parted. It was sent to her.
She answered, and the exchange closes the section. The prose ends by remarking that these are tales, and that such things happen. The poem was later included in the Kokin-shū.

The opening negates the same verb twice: neither not seeing nor seeing — a state that can be called neither. The glimpse through the gap in the blind is exactly that, put into words.
What follows is his longing for a person seen so; he has not properly seen her, and longs for her all the same.
The word in the fourth line means without cause, against all reason: he cannot account for the longing himself.
The closing means spending the day lost in thought, the verb being that of gazing while brooding. The whole poem is built on the single fact of having neither seen nor not seen — the act of glimpsing turned into a verse.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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