Yukedo nao yukiyararenu wa imo ga umu otsu no ura naru kishi no matsubara - Tosa Nikki(English Translation & Meaning)

ゆけどなほ行きやられぬはいもがうむ
をつの浦なるきしの松原

Roma-ji: Yukedo nao yukiyararenu wa imo ga umu otsu no ura naru kishi no matsubara
English Translation: Though we go and go,
we can never reach the end:
like the hemp she spins,
the pine grove along the shore
of Otsu Bay stretches on
Meaning: Though we press on and on, we can never get past it—the pine grove along the shore of Otsu Bay, drawn out long as the hemp a wife spins.
Commentary: 44 The Fifth Day of the Second Month: The God of Sumiyoshi and the Mirror

On the fifth day of the second month, the party at last set out from Izumi-no-nada toward the anchorage of Otsu. A pine grove stretched as far as the eye could see. Everyone was suffering, and so they composed poems. Before long the master of the boat urged them to row quickly while the weather was good, and the steersman told the boatmen, "Orders from the master's boat: haul on the towropes before the morning north wind rises." His words happened to come out in thirty-one syllables, just like a poem. That day, thanks to everyone's praying all day long that the waves would not rise, neither wind nor waves arose.
On this day the mother of the lost child also composes a poem. The diary calls her "the mother of the one now gone"; she is the mother of the daughter who died in Tosa. Sumiyoshi lies around present-day Sumiyoshi Ward in Osaka, and its god was worshipped as a deity of seafaring.
Looking at the pine grove stretching on and on, someone composed this poem amid the hardship of the journey. The poet is not named.
As poems kept being composed, the steersman's words, spoken in answer to the master's urging, happened to take the shape of a poem; when someone who heard them wrote them out, they came to just over thirty syllables.

The first line, "Yukedo nao," means "though we go on, still." The second line, "yukiyararenu wa," means "that we cannot get through": "yaru" means to carry an action to its end, "re" is an auxiliary of possibility, and "nu" the attributive form of the negative auxiliary "zu."
The third line, "imo ga umu," means "the hemp (o) that my wife spins," and through the sound "o" works as a preface leading to the place name Otsu. The fourth line, "otsu no ura naru," means "on Otsu Bay," and the final line, "kishi no matsubara," "the pine grove on the shore," ends on a noun.
The poem says that the feeling of never getting past, however far one goes, comes from the pine grove stretching endlessly along the shore of Otsu Bay, overlaying the frustration of the journey on the vast scene of the pines.
Author: Ki no Tsurayuki
Source: Tosa Nikki
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