One of my favourite books, The Tales of Ise, has some of my favourite things – writing about inexpressible, seldom-thought topics, in words that don’t exist in other languages, whose meaning is hard to pin down.

Writing the inexpressible in non-existent words is as good a definition of poetry as any I’ve heard.

Growing up as I did from country to country, floating from Dutch to French to English to German (and my own hybrid, incomprehensible jumbles of them all), I’ve always loved expressions which are unique and without equivalents in other languages.

Long ago, I wrote about this in a haiku, an almost untranslateable form in itself:

between any two

untranslateabilities

we find more meaning.

In episode 21 of the Tales, two lovers exchange poems, seven in all.

The final one has the image of:

… a cloud in mid-air

that vanishes in the sky

leaving not a trace.

The translator, Peter Macmillan, comments: “The word ‘mid-air’ (na-kazora), referring to the space between the sky and the earth, is a metaphor for being in a state that is neither one thing nor another.”

Elsewhere, I’ve seen “nakazora”  described as “a Buddhist word” meaning “empty air” or “a state where the feet do not touch the ground”.

Elsewhere still, the etymology of なかぞら is explained as being made up of “naka” (middle, or centre) and “zora” (sky, or empty space).

The range of meanings has made the word understandably popular in Classical Japanese literature.

I’m not sure whether the romanisation of the word, hyphened as “na-kazora”, is strictly correct, but I prefer it to “nakazora”.

My poem:

na-kazora

blue sky above us

wide and still, looking out

in silence, so rare, there floats

a single cloud, seen by all,

na-kazora, untouchable.

*

Something (or someone) everyone can see, but out of reach, like a star (either in space or a person).

Ethereal, in suspension, between states, untranslateable.

Like lovers estrangeing?

Who knows?