Samo koso wa chigauru yume wa katakarame awade hodo furu mi sae uki kana

English Translation

No doubt it is so:
a dream is a hard thing to
turn aside; and yet
harder still is this body
that passes the days unmet.

Meaning

No doubt it is so: a dream is a hard thing to turn aside. And harder still is this body of mine, passing the days without a meeting.

Commentary

26 Exchanges with the Lady of the Jōganden

Toward the end of the twelfth month the lady of the Jōganden withdrew to the house on the west. On the last day of the month there was a sudden earthquake, and from midday on it went on rumbling and rattling while she sat watching it alone; and so the year turned to the first of Anna. About midday on New Year's Day, since no men were about among the guest's household, all was quiet. Hearing that the lady was still next door, they laughed together over what one waits for on such a day; and while they were at it, someone idly fetched a little figure of a man made of millet, pressed it against the leg-end of the pheasant from before, wrote on it, and sent it in to the lady. She dried some seaweed, tore it into short pieces, tied them together, shifted the load to the end of the pole, carved a calf onto the leg that had been thin, and sent it back larger than it had come. When the day was well up the festival food was served; the same was done in this house, and the fifteenth also passed in the usual way. The third month came. A letter that seemed meant for the guest's household was misdelivered here. It read that he could not leave things as they were and thought of calling before long, but that there might be someone who would rather it were not he. Since the lady had long been used to seeing such things, the author supposed this was how it went; even so she did not let it pass, but wrote a few words very small, and sent it back saying that it should be taken to that lady. When the lady had read it a reply came at once. Since this lady attended the Crown Prince almost as a mother, she was bound to go to the palace. She said again and again that she could not stay as she was, and so the author called on her in the evening. Just then voices were heard on the other side; the lady kept saying so, so, but the author would not attend to it, and the lady seemed to be growing drowsy as one does in the early evening. Then someone came walking up and made an announcement, and the author went home without any ease of mind. The next evening the lady went to the palace. In the fifth month, when she withdrew to put off mourning for the Emperor, it had been arranged that she should come here as before; but saying she had seen something inauspicious in a dream, she withdrew to the other house. Since portents kept coming in dreams, and she wished there were some way of averting them, in the seventh month, on a night of very bright moon, she sent a poem. Four poems on dreams follow, and then an exchange on a river.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The lady of the Jōganden was a daughter of Fujiwara no Morosuke and a consort of the late Emperor Murakami, and Kaneie's sister; the text gives no name, and she is taken to be Fujiwara no Tōshi. At the end of the previous year she had withdrawn to the house immediately west of the author's, and the exchanges that follow depend upon that nearness. The writer of the misdelivered letter is Kaneie, third son of Fujiwara no Morosuke, who would rise to be regent and chancellor.
It is a night of very bright moon in the seventh month of the first year of Anna, and the place is the author's dwelling.
It answers the lady, who had written that she could not turn her dream aside and could not sleep.
The lady replied by return with "Au to mishi yume ni nakanaka kurasarete nagori koishiku samenu narikeri," and the exchange continues.

She takes back the dream that must be turned aside. The opening means: no doubt it is as you say, conceding the other's case at the outset. The second and third lines allow that turning a dream aside must indeed be hard, the emphatic construction implying that this much, at least, is granted. The fourth line draws the matter over to her own side, naming the days that pass without their meeting because of the dream. The particle in the close is additive: the dream is hard enough, and on top of that her own condition is harder still. Where the other had spoken of the pain of sleeplessness, she sets beside it the pain of not meeting, using the same word for hardship while exchanging its content. It amounts, too, to a gentle prompting that the dream has served long enough as a reason for staying away.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other