Fumi miredo kumo no kakehashi ayaushi to omoi shirazu mo tanomu naru kana

English Translation

You tread it — you read
it — and still, not knowing how
perilous a thing
a bridge of cloud can be, you
go on counting upon it.

Meaning

You tread it, you read it, and still, not knowing how perilous a bridge of cloud can be, you go on counting upon it.

Commentary

100 Michitsuna and the Woman of Yatsuhashi

The Assistant Master was suddenly called on to dance at the special festival, and from the rehearsal to the day of the festival everything was in a rush. On the day itself the author went out in her carriage to watch, and among the ranks of nobles' carriages she saw with some embarrassment how splendid the party of a certain person appeared. Then someone took it upon himself to say that the Assistant Master ought not to go on as he was, and through that a correspondence was begun with a woman. She was perhaps someone about Yatsuhashi. He sent the first poem, but no answer came that time. He sent another, and this time she replied. After that the exchange continued, on the difficulty of the road, the cloud-paths of the open sky and the peril of a bridge of cloud, until eight poems had passed. That day it grew dark and they left off.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The Assistant Master is her son Fujiwara no Michitsuna, appointed Assistant Master of the Right Stables that year. Of the woman the text says only that she was perhaps someone about Yatsuhashi, and gives no name. Yatsuhashi is a poetic place in Mikawa, where eight bridges were said to be laid across a stream, spread out like the legs of a spider.
It is about the eleventh month of the second year of Tenen, and the place is the woman's house about Yatsuhashi.
It answers his poem claiming that, since there is a bridge of cloud, there is no cause to grieve.
He then sent "Nao oramu kokoro tanomoshi ashitazu no kumoji orikuru tsubasa ya wa naki."

She takes back his bridge and his counting. The word at the opening has served from the beginning of this exchange, meaning both to tread a bridge and a letter, so that treading it and reading it are said at once; the line is adversative and carries into the next. The second resets his bridge of cloud unchanged. The third means: that it is perilous — a bridge made of cloud will give way underfoot. The fourth means without knowing it, describing a man who does not understand the danger. The close is exclamatory: and still he counts upon it — holding him off while keeping a note of astonishment. She grants his claim that a bridge exists and answers that it will not bear crossing, so that the manner of refusal shifts its position slightly with every poem. The recurrence of the verb for treading throughout the exchange is also worth noting.

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other