国つ神空にことわる仲ならば
なほざりごとをまづや糾さむ
なほざりごとをまづや糾さむ
- Roma-ji
-
Kunitsukami sora ni kotowaru naka naraba
naozarigoto o mazu ya tadasamu - English Translation
-
If the land's own gods
are to judge between you two
up there in the sky,
then let them first look into
the idle words you have said
- Meaning
- If the gods of the land are to judge this from the sky, they will surely first call your idle words to account.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Sakaki
This came back from the Priestess's side in answer. She was only fourteen, and a woman of her household in fact wrote it, but it turns his words aside with real wit. Genji smiled over it and thought her a person of some quality for her years, regretted that he had never seen her as a child, and reflected that a meeting might come one day after all.
"Kunitsukami" takes up his own word, keeping to the etiquette of exchange, as does "to judge." "Naozarigoto" is careless talk, words meant lightly: if the gods are to judge, she says, what they will judge is his own insincerity. Turning his appeal to the gods back against him, the poem is the work of an experienced hand, for all that it was written for another.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Even in itself a parting in autumn is a sad enough thing— do not add your crying to it, pine crickets of the field
- If the land's own gods, who keep the eight islands safe, have hearts in them too, let them judge between us in a parting we have not willed
- I would not call up those old days again today, and hold myself back, and yet within my own heart there is a sadness in it
- Though you shake me off and go on your way today, at the Suzuka's eighty shallows, will your sleeves not be wet with the water