のぼりぬる煙はそれとわかねども
なべて雲居のあはれなるかな
なべて雲居のあはれなるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Noborinuru keburi wa sore to wakanedomo
nabete kumoi no aware naru kana - English Translation
-
The smoke that has climbed
and gone I cannot tell out
from the rest of it,
and yet the whole of the sky
where the clouds are moves my heart
- Meaning
- I cannot tell which of it is the smoke that rose, and so the whole of the clouded sky moves me.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Aoi
After bearing a son, Aoi no Ue seemed for a time to be out of danger, but while Genji was at the palace she suddenly failed and died. For two or three days they kept watch over her, and then the funeral came and she was carried to Toribeno. Returning at daybreak past the twentieth of the eighth month, after a night of rites, Genji looked up at the sky and spoke this poem. Afterward he stayed on at the Minister of the Left's house in mourning.
"The smoke that rose" is the smoke of the pyre, and the poem states plainly that it cannot be picked out. "Kumoi" is the sky where the clouds are, so that the dead woman's whereabouts widen into the whole of it. Because nothing can be identified, everything is sad—and by that turn one death opens into a larger feeling. It is an elegy that never states its emotion directly, resting entirely on how the scene is taken in.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- It is in shallows that you have stepped down, I think; as for me, my own road of love is deep enough to soak me quite through and through
- This soul of mine that, worn out with grief, goes drifting loose across the sky— bind it and hold it here, please, by your under-garment's hem
- Since a limit holds, this robe of pale ink is light in its color, yet the tears have gone and made of my sleeves a deep pool indeed
- Even to hear of how it goes with human life leaves me wet with dew, and I think of the sleeve of the one who is left behind