身の憂さを嘆くにあかで明くる夜は
とり重ねてぞ音もなかれける
とり重ねてぞ音もなかれける
- Roma-ji
-
Mi no usa o nageku ni akade akuru yo wa
torikasanete zo ne mo nakarekeru - English Translation
-
This night that breaks up
before I have grieved my fill
at my wretched life—
laid over the bird's crying,
my own voice cries out as well
- Meaning
- On a night that breaks before I have grieved my fill over my own wretchedness, my voice cries out along with the bird's.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Hahakigi
Utsusemi answered Genji's poem with this one. A married woman who had passed a night she never intended, she grieves over what her life has become. Genji left once he had her reply, but from then on she set her heart against ever receiving him again, and would not answer even the appeals he sent through her young brother, Kogimi.
"Akade" sounds both "unsatisfied" and "breaking into dawn," tying the ending night to a grief that will not clear. "Torikasanete" plays on the bird and on laying one thing over another, returning the same sound he had used in "toriaenu." Where his poem is about the haste of parting, hers is about her low standing and her position as another man's wife, and it becomes plain that the two of them are looking at entirely different things.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- If we were a pair who let no night come between the times that we meet, why would the daylight hours then be anything to shrink from
- Before I have done blaming her for her coldness, at this break of dawn the cock crows to startle me into leaving all behind
- While I grieve and ask if that dream night comes again, not even our eyes have been allowed to meet now, and the days have worn away
- Not knowing the heart of the broom tree that fades out, I have lost my way along Sonohara's road, wandering there for nothing