Omoiki ya amatsu sora naru amagumo o sode shite wakuru yama fumamu to wa

English Translation

Did I ever think
that I should come to tread a
mountain, parting with
my own sleeve the clouds of heaven
that belong to the high sky?

Meaning

Did I ever think that I should come to tread a mountain, parting with my own sleeve the clouds of heaven that belong to the high sky?

Commentary

86 The Retreat at a Mountain Temple in the Second Month

Spring came, and she went privately to a temple deep in the hills to pray. Day broke and rain began to fall; and seeing the clouds rise up out of the valley below, she was overcome with sadness and composed a poem.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. In this year Michitsuna became Assistant Master of the Right Stables, and after an account of the archery at the retired emperor's palace comes this pilgrimage. The text does not say which temple in the hills it was.
It is spring in the second year of Tenen, and the place is a temple deep in the hills.
She had gone there privately to pray; day broke and rain began to fall, and seeing the clouds rise up out of the valley below she was overcome with sadness and composed this.
It was sent to no one and stayed within her. Afterward the Master of the Right Stables writes through Michitsuna to ask for the adopted daughter's hand.

The opening is rhetorical — did she ever think it? she did not — and begins from the unexpectedness of her situation. The second means that they belong to the sky above, marking them as something one looks up at. The third names the clouds of heaven; since the first book, at "Okuyama no omoiyari dani kanashiki ni mata amagumo no kakaru nani nari," this diary has also used the word with the sense of a nun, for renunciation of the world, and in a scene of praying at a mountain temple that overtone may be heard here too. The fourth means parting them with her sleeve, the actual sight of walking through cloud rising from the valley and brushing it aside. The inversion — that cloud which ought to be in the sky is being parted by a sleeve — is the point of the poem. The close takes up the rhetorical question of the first line and ends there. That she should find herself inside the very clouds she used to look up at becomes the figure for a life she never expected, and scene and feeling meet at the single act of parting cloud.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other