初草の生ひ行く末も知らぬ間に
いかでか露の消えむとすらむ
いかでか露の消えむとすらむ
- Roma-ji
-
Hatsukusa no oiyuku sue mo shiranu ma ni
ikade ka tsuyu no kiemu to suramu - English Translation
-
While the young grasses
end is not yet to be seen,
how can it be that
the dew should already make
ready to fade and be gone
- Meaning
- While no one can yet see where this young grass will grow, how could the dew already be making ready to vanish?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Wakamurasaki
Hearing the nun's poem, a woman attending her answered through tears with this one. She gently checks her mistress's talk of dying, telling her that with so much still ahead she should not speak so. Listening beyond the fence, Genji was touched by the delicacy of feeling in that household, and his interest in the girl deepened further.
"Young grass" here takes up the nun's own word and returns it, as the etiquette of poetic exchange required. The dew again stands for the nun, so that the two poems correspond exactly within one image. Where the nun lamented having no sky to vanish into, this one asks how the dew could vanish at all—a neat instance of reusing a word and reversing its sense. The poem carries the closeness between mistress and attendant.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The one who has passed and the one who parts today go by two separate roads, and where either of them goes I know not, this autumn dusk
- Not knowing the place where this young grass will grow up, the dew that leaves it behind has no sky at all in which it could fade away
- Since I looked upon the young leaves of that new grass, the sleeve I lie on here in my traveler's bed has not once been dry of dew
- The dew of one night, this night alone, on the grass you bind as pillow— do not set it up beside the moss of these deep mountains