なき魂ぞいとど悲しき寝し床の
あくがれがたき心ならひに
あくがれがたき心ならひに
- Roma-ji
-
Naki tama zo itodo kanashiki neshi toko no
akugaregataki kokoronarai ni - English Translation
-
That soul now gone is
the sadder to me for this:
this bed where we slept,
and a heart so used to it
that it cannot wander free
- Meaning
- The soul that has gone grows sadder to me still, for my heart is too used to this bed we shared to drift away from it.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Aoi
On the day he left the Minister of the Left's house, Genji finished his leave-taking and went last of all through Aoi no Ue's rooms. The furnishings were as they had always been, and only her absence stood out. Near the inkstone by the curtained bed lay sheets of practice writing she had left, and he and the Minister took them up together. Beside a line of old verse she had copied, Genji wrote this poem.
"The soul now gone" is the dead woman's. "Akugaru" is a soul leaving the body and drifting, a word used again and again in this chapter for Rokujo no Miyasudokoro's living spirit. The point here is that he reverses it and uses it for a heart that cannot leave. At the close of a chapter in which another's soul went wandering, he says his own cannot stir from a bed, and the same word set against itself sounds through the whole scene.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- This evening above all others my sleeve is wet with the dew of it, though I have passed through many autumns of grieving before
- Since I heard that you were left behind by the one gone in autumn mist, I have wondered how it is with you under these showers
- With you gone, the dust has gathered on the wild pink— and brushing away the dew from it, how many nights shall I lie down alone
- For no cause at all you have kept a wall between, night piling on night, and yet the robes of those nights had grown familiar to us