見し人の煙を雲とながむれば
夕べの空もむつましきかな
夕べの空もむつましきかな
- Roma-ji
-
Mishi hito no keburi o kumo to nagamureba
yūbe no sora mo mutsumashiki kana - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- When I look up and take the smoke of the one I knew for a cloud, even the evening sky becomes dear to me.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Yugao
After the woman's sudden death at the deserted mansion, Genji, fearing a scandal, had Koremitsu move the body secretly to Higashiyama for cremation. He went himself to take his leave of her, and on the way back grief left him barely able to keep his seat on the horse. Watching the smoke rise, he spoke this poem. Afterward he fell gravely ill and could not appear in public for some time.
"The one I knew" means the woman he had visited so intimately. Taking smoke for cloud is an old conceit, but the turn by which the whole evening sky then becomes dear to him is where the depth of his grief shows. He voices no reproach and no lament, only the act of looking at the sky, and the size of the loss sits inside that restraint. It is the best known poem of the Yugao chapter.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- I had come to know this cast-off shell of a world is a bitter thing, and still my life hangs upon a few leaves of words from you