English translation:
Ten thousand miles of river and sky, ten thousand miles of thoughts,
a whirlwind of downy flowers scattering in a peaceful grove—
the bridges and roads are closed, and my horse’s hooves are slick.
Yet again, Indigo Pass is blocked!
This is an old poem by Yujian, brushed by Old Jōtai
Transcription of the original Chinese:
萬里江天萬里心
飄ゝ花絮灑平林
橋橫路斷馬蹄滑
更說藍關轉不禁
右宝磵古詩 承兌叟書
The poetic inscription— four seven-character lines followed by a descriptive signature line and the vermilion seal of the inscriber— is written in Chinese, the language favored by Japanese Buddhist monks, and is read right to left and top to bottom. The first couplet sets the scene: the mind distracted in a woods in the dead of a winter evening. The second alludes to a famously exiled Chinese poet, Han Yu (768-824).
It's an "old poem," the inscriber tells us, by the 13th-century Chinese monk Yujian Ruofen. His poetry and paintings were beloved in medieval Japan, and the wet, abstract style of this painting—called “splashed-ink,” or "haboku" in Japanese—is also associated with Yujian
The inscriber, Saishō Jōtai, was a well-connected Zen priest. He served as the abbot of Shōkokuji, the most important monastery in the capital, Kyoto, and was a trusted advisor of Japan’s rulers, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu.