Kokoro nomi hedatezu tote mo tabigoromo yamaji kasanaru ochi no shirakumo

English Translation

Our hearts are not far
from one another, and yet
your travelling robe
lies past range on range of hills—
white clouds in the distances.

Meaning

Our hearts, at least, are not divided; and yet between us the mountain roads lie fold on fold, and white clouds stand far off.

Commentary

Section 21 Tamesuke's Fifty Poems and the Replies to Them

Through the summer, letters stopped coming to a strange degree, and her uneasiness was more than ordinary. News that waves were rising on the shore of Shiga and that there were disturbances at the Mountain and at Miidera made her more anxious still. At last, on the second of the eighth month, a messenger arrived, and she gathered up and read the letters that had been accumulating from various people. From the young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, came fifty poems, sent down without even a fair copy made, saying that he had composed them. His poems had grown very fine. That eighteen of the fifty should have earned her mark seemed to her strange, and doubtless her parent's blind love was at fault. Among them she found one poem, and taking it to have been written out of thought for her under a traveller's sky, she was moved, and beside that poem, in small characters, she wrote an answer and sent it back. Beside another poem on the same travel topic she likewise added an answer. Then, at the end of the fifty, she wrote a note, setting down her general remarks on the poems, and at the very end she added a poem of her own.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, is her son Tamesuke, called the Jiju since the section of parting poems, who on the day of her departure answered her with "Tsui ni yomo ada ni wa naraji moshiogusa katami o miyo no ato ni nokoseba." This section takes an unusual form for an exchange: she marks his fifty poems, and writes her replies in small characters beside them. The one long gone, named in the poem at the end, is the dead Tameie, the person to whom she would above all have liked to show these fifty.

After the second day of the eighth month of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, over the fifty poems that had come from the capital.

It is one of the fifty poems Tamesuke sent, on the topic of travel. Abutsu-ni took it to have been written out of thought for her under a traveller's sky, and was moved by it.

Beside it she wrote her answer in small characters and sent the sheets back. The reply is "Koishinobu kokoro ya taguu asayū ni yukite wa kaeru ochi no shirakumo," which takes over its closing line unchanged.

Nearness of heart and distance of road are measured against each other by a single cloud. The limiting particle in the first line puts first the thing that is not divided. The concessive in the second line grants that the hearts are joined and then turns to the actual distance. The third line names the travelling robe, the word that has stood for the traveller herself since "Ada ni nomi namida wa kakeji tabigoromo kokoro no yukite tachikaeru hodo" among the parting poems. The fourth line has the mountain roads lying fold upon fold, setting an undivided heart squarely against a road that will not stop dividing. The closing line ends on a noun, with the word for far off; the white clouds standing at that distance make the number of ranges visible to the eye. Though written on a set topic, the poem was taken by his mother as written for her in fact, and it is this sense of real ranges of hills that made her read it so.

Author

Reizei Tameuji

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other