光ありと見し夕顔のうは露は
たそかれ時のそら目なりけり
たそかれ時のそら目なりけり
- Roma-ji
-
Hikari ari to mishi yūgao no uwatsuyu wa
tasokaredoki no sorame narikeri - English Translation
-
That upper dew laid
on the evening face flower,
which I saw as light—
it was nothing but a trick
my eyes played at dusk that day
- Meaning
- The dew on the evening face flower that I took for light was only a trick of my eyes in the dusk.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Yugao
To Genji's poem, spoken with his face uncovered, she answered with this one. She takes back her own first poem on the fan, with its "light added by the white dew," and turns it aside lightly: you were not, after all, what I supposed. He read her temper in the answer. But late that night, just after he dreamed of a woman appearing at his pillow, she was seized with pain and died.
"Uwa tsuyu" is the dew lying on the surface of a flower, taking up the "white dew" of her first poem. "Sorame" means a trick of sight, and she gives the dimness of dusk as her reason. The form is modesty—unsaying a poem that praised too highly—yet the phrase about mistaking the light rings heavily against what comes next. The exchange also pairs deliberately with the one that opened the chapter.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- When I look and take the smoke of the one I knew to be that cloud there, even this evening sky grows close and dear to me somehow
- You do not ask why I do not ask after you, and the days wear on— how greatly, all this while, has my heart been torn and confused