Kore ya yume izure ka utsutsu hakanasa o omoiwakade mo suginubeki kana - Senzai Wakashu(English Translation & Meaning)

これや夢いづれか現はかなさを
思ひわかでも過ぎぬべきかな

Roma-ji: Kore ya yume izure ka utsutsu hakanasa o omoiwakade mo suginubeki kana
English Translation: Is this the dream?
Which of them is waking life?
Their fleeting natures
I shall never tell apart
before my life slips by
Meaning: Is this the dream? Which is waking? I must surely pass my life without ever telling apart their fleeting natures.
Commentary: Book Seventeen Miscellaneous Poems II 1130

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Composed on the theme of impermanence when I presented a hundred-poem sequence"
This poem was composed on the theme of impermanence when she presented a hundred-poem sequence to Retired Emperor Sutoku. Is this the dream, which is waking; I shall surely pass on without telling their fleetingness apart, she says. Both dream and waking are fleeting, and life will slip by without one ever discerning which is real, she sings, voicing the uncertainty of living in an impermanent world. The idea recalls the poem in the second book of miscellaneous poems of the Kokin Wakashū, "yo no naka wa yume ka utsutsu ka utsutsu tomo yume tomo shirazu arite nakereba."
The author, "Hyōe of Jōsaimon'in," was a daughter of Minamoto no Akinaka, head of the Office of Divinities. She served Taikenmon'in and later her daughter, Jōsaimon'in Princess Muneko. She was a younger sister of Taikenmon'in no Horikawa.
It belongs to the same hundred-poem sequence as 1128, two poems before, and both sing of the impossibility of telling dream from waking. The poems on dreams that began with 1123 of this book end with this one.

First line, "kore ya yume": "ya" is an interrogative binding particle, "is this the dream?" The poem pauses here.
Second line, "izure ka utsutsu": "which of them is waking?" and the poem pauses here as well. It shares "utsutsu" with "utsutsu o mo utsutsu to" in the first and second lines of 1128 of this book.
Third line, "hakanasa o": "the fleetingness" of both dream and waking.
Fourth line, "omoiwakade mo": "omoiwaku" means to distinguish in thought, and "de" is a negative conjunctive particle, "without being able to tell them apart."
Fifth line, "suginubeki kana": "nu" is intensive and "beki" the attributive of the conjectural "beshi," "my life will surely slip by."
Author: Jōsaimon'in no Hyōe
Source: Senzai Wakashu
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