Aounabara furisake mireba kasuga naru mikasa no yama ni ideshi tsuki kamo - Tosa Nikki(English Translation & Meaning)

あをうなばらふりさけ見れば春日なる
三笠の山にいでし月かも

Roma-ji: Aounabara furisake mireba kasuga naru mikasa no yama ni ideshi tsuki kamo
English Translation: Gazing far across
the vast blue plain of the sea,
I see the same moon
that rose on Mount Mikasa
in Kasuga, long ago
Meaning: Gazing far out over the wide blue sea, I see the moon—the very moon that once rose over Mount Mikasa in Kasuga, back home.
Commentary: 29 The Twentieth Day of the First Month: Abe no Nakamaro's Moon Poem

On the twentieth day of the first month the weather was the same as the day before; the boat could not sail, and everyone lamented. In their distress and impatience they did nothing but count the days that had passed—today makes so many, twenty, thirty—on their fingers, until it seemed their fingers might be worn out. Unable to sleep at night, they saw the moon of the twentieth rise. There was no mountain rim; the moon came up out of the sea.
Abe no Nakamaro lived in the Nara period. He went to Tang China as a student with an embassy and served at the Tang court. Later he tried to return home, but the ship he boarded was wrecked and he could not, and he ended his life in China. The diary tells how, at the place where Nakamaro was to board ship for home, the people of Tang held a farewell feast and composed Chinese poems in sorrow at parting.
The farewell feast went on, reluctant to end, until the moon of the twentieth night rose from the sea. Seeing it, Nakamaro said that in his country even the gods had composed poems since the age of the gods, and that now people high and low alike composed them when they grieved at parting or knew joy or sorrow; and he composed this poem.
It seemed the people of Tang would not understand it, but when he wrote out its meaning in Chinese characters and had someone versed in the Japanese language explain it, they seemed to grasp its heart and were unexpectedly moved. The diarist writes that although the words of China and Japan differ, the light of the moon must be the same, and so perhaps human hearts are the same as well. Then, thinking back on that long-ago time, a certain person composed "Miyako nite yama no ha ni mishi tsuki naredo nami yori idete nami ni koso ire."
This poem is included among the travel poems of the Kokin Wakashū in the form "Ama no hara furisake mireba Kasuga naru Mikasa no yama ni ideshi tsuki kamo," and was also chosen for the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. In the Tosa Diary its first line is "aounabara."

The first line, "Aounabara," means the wide blue plain of the sea and has an extra syllable. The second line, "furisake mireba," means "when I gaze far into the distance."
In the third line, "Kasuga naru," "naru" is the attributive form of the auxiliary "nari" expressing location: "in Kasuga." Mount Mikasa in the fourth line is the mountain behind Kasuga Shrine in Nara. In the final line, "ideshi tsuki kamo," "shi" is the attributive form of the past auxiliary "ki" and "kamo" an exclamatory particle: ah, it is that moon which rose over Mount Mikasa long ago.
The poem overlays the moon gazed upon in a foreign land with the moon seen over Mount Mikasa at home in youth, expressing longing for home. In the Tosa Diary, the story of this poem is laid over the scene of the twentieth night, when the moon rises from the sea with no mountain rim at all.
Author: Ki no Tsurayuki
Source: Tosa Nikki
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