Miwa no yama machi miru koto no yuyushisa ni sugi tateri to mo e koso shirasene

English Translation

To wait and look for
you at Miwa would be an
ill-omened thing; so,
even if a cedar stands there,
I cannot let you know of it.

Meaning

To wait and look for you at Miwa would be ill-omened; so, even if a cedar stands there, I cannot let you know of it.

Commentary

68 The Yamato-Seeming Woman: The Exchange on Mount Miwa

One day in the fourth month she took Michitsuna with her to Chisokuin. On the way back they saw a lady's carriage of some distinction; Michitsuna followed it and traced it to a house at the foot of Mount Miwa. The next day he sent the lady a poem. She said she had no idea what it meant, but he sent another, and she answered.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son, eighteen that year. The text calls the woman only the Yamato-seeming person and gives no name. Mount Miwa is a poetic place in Yamato, known from the old poem in which a cedar marks the house one is to visit.
It is the fourth month of the third year of Tenroku, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
It answers Michitsuna's second poem, saying that he had begun to seek the foot of Mount Miwa.
After this exchange the account moves to the poems on the sweet flag, and Michitsuna writes to the woman again.

She takes back his Mount Miwa and his cedar. The opening resets the place name and passes to the second line, which means to wait and receive, to look for someone's coming; where the old poem had the lover waiting at a gate marked by a cedar, she picks up the waiting alone. The third means that it would be ill-omened, a thing to be avoided, and so puts the waiting aside. The fourth means: even supposing a cedar does stand there — producing the old poem's own landmark while declining to acknowledge it. The close joins the construction of impossibility to an emphatic particle: she cannot let him know. To a man who has come by way of an old poem she gives her refusal within the frame of that same poem, so that even in refusing she meets him on his own ground — a reply that keeps carefully to the etiquette of exchange.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other