Miwataseba matsu no uregoto ni sumu tsuru wa chiyo no dochi to zo omou beranaru - Tosa Nikki(English Translation & Meaning)

見渡せば松のうれごとにすむ鶴は
千代のどちとぞ思ふべらなる

Roma-ji: Miwataseba matsu no uregoto ni sumu tsuru wa chiyo no dochi to zo omou beranaru
English Translation: As I gaze around,
the cranes that dwell on each crown
of the pine trees seem
to think of them as old friends
to share a thousand ages
Meaning: Gazing out across the grove, I see cranes nesting in every pine crown, as if they counted the pines as companions for a thousand years.
Commentary: 18 The Ninth Day of the First Month: Parting from Well-Wishers and the Pines of Uda

Early on the ninth day of the first month, the party rowed out from Ōminato toward the anchorage of Naha. Many came to see them off as far as the provincial border, but above all Fujiwara no Tokizane, Tachibana no Suehira and Hasebe no Yukimasa had been following them from place to place ever since the day they left the residence. The diarist writes that these were people of true devotion, and that their devotion was surely no less deep than this sea. As the boat pulled away, those left on the shore grew distant, until the people on the boat could no longer be seen.
Fujiwara no Tokizane, Tachibana no Suehira and Hasebe no Yukimasa were all people who had been on close terms with the former governor in Tosa. Tokizane had already held a farewell feast for them on the twenty-second day of the twelfth month, even though the journey was by sea.
The boat passed by the pine grove of Uda. The pines were beyond counting, and no one knew how many thousand years they had stood. Waves broke at the foot of every trunk, and cranes flew about every branch. Unable merely to look on at such a delightful scene, a boatman composed this poem.
The diarist comments that the poem falls short of actually seeing the place. After this the party rowed on as the sun set and the night deepened, unable to tell east from west, leaving everything to the steersman. The women wept in the bottom of the boat, while the boatmen and the steersman sang their boat songs without a care.

The first line, "Miwataseba," means "as I look around," conveying the expanse of the Uda pine grove. In the second line, "ure" means the tip of a branch, the treetop. The third line, "sumu tsuru wa," means "the cranes that dwell there."
In the fourth line, "dochi" means companion or friend: companions for a thousand ages. "Zo" is an emphatic particle. In the final line, "beranari" is an auxiliary of conjecture favored in the early Heian period; answering "zo," it takes the attributive form "beranaru" in a kakari-musubi construction.
Pine and crane are both auspicious emblems of long life, and the poem joins them as companions for a thousand years. It turns the scene before the eyes directly into a poem of celebration, but the narration frankly judges that the poem does not live up to the splendor of the view.
Author: Ki no Tsurayuki
Source: Tosa Nikki
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