雨となりしぐるる空の浮雲を
いづれの方とわきて眺めむ
いづれの方とわきて眺めむ
- Roma-ji
-
Ame to nari shigururu sora no ukigumo o
izure no kata to wakite nagamemu - English Translation
-
Turned now into rain,
in this sky of cold showers
the drifting clouds go—
and which of them am I to
single out and look upon
- Meaning
- She has turned to rain; and among the drifting clouds of this showery sky, which am I to pick out and gaze upon?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Aoi
Even after the memorial services Genji stayed shut up at the Minister of the Left's until the last day. Sorry for him in his unaccustomed idleness, Aoi's brother, the Third Rank Captain, came often to sit with him, talking of the world and of old love affairs. One bleak evening of falling showers he arrived in a grey robe, sat down beside Genji, who was looking out at the frost-killed garden, and spoke this poem half to himself. Genji answered, and the Captain understood again how deep his grief ran.
"Turned to rain" draws on the Chinese story in which the dead become cloud and rain. "The drifting clouds of a showery sky" takes the scene before them straight into the poem. "Which of them" states the impossibility of telling one from another, standing on the same thought as Genji's poem at the funeral. A brother's grief for his sister is set down as an unceremonious murmur, and that is very much this man's manner.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- The one who remains and the one who has vanished are one dew-like world, and to keep reserve in it is a frail thing, is it not
- The very sky where the one I knew has turned to rain and gone from us is darkened over the more by these showers, this season
- This pink that remains at the withered brushwood fence where the grasses die— I look on it as a sign of the autumn we parted