いにしへもかくやは人の惑ひけむ
我がまだ知らぬしののめの道
我がまだ知らぬしののめの道
- Roma-ji
-
Inishie mo kaku ya wa hito no madoikemu
waga mada shiranu shinonome no michi - English Translation
-
Did those long ago
lose their way in this manner,
bewildered as I?
This road at the break of dawn
is one I have never known
- Meaning
- Did people long ago lose themselves like this? This road at daybreak is one I have never traveled before.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Yugao
At dawn on the fifteenth night of the eighth month, Genji, avoiding all eyes, took the woman from the house at Gojo into his carriage and carried her off to a ruined mansion. Still without telling her who he was, he felt on the way a bewilderment at his own conduct and spoke this poem. She answered with one of her own, revealing her unease. That very night, at the house they reached, the disaster falls.
"Did people long ago do so too" is a way of testing his own state against the world of older poetry. "The road at daybreak" usually means the road home after a night together, but here it is this unheard-of journey with a woman beside him. "One I have never known" states his inexperience and his fear plainly, showing that this is no convenient diversion but real confusion.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Taking as our guide the road the lay ascetic walks in his practice, do not break the deeper vow that binds us in the next world
- Since the bond I had in a life before this one is known by my grief, I cannot bring myself yet to trust in what is to come
- Not knowing the heart of the ridge line it moves toward, the moon goes onward— and up in the empty sky will its light not fade and end
- The flower that loosed its cords in the evening dew did so, after all, out of the bond that first showed by the way of that roadside