振り捨てて今日は行くとも鈴鹿川
八十瀬の波に袖は濡れじや
八十瀬の波に袖は濡れじや
- Roma-ji
-
Furisutete kyō wa yuku tomo Suzukagawa
yasose no nami ni sode wa nureji ya - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Though you shake me off and go today, will your sleeves not be wet at the many shallows of the Suzuka?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Sakaki
The party set out after dark, and their road from Nijo turning down Toin passed in front of the Nijo residence. Moved by it, Genji sent this poem fixed to a sakaki branch. It was dark and hurried and no answer came then; one arrived the next day from beyond the Osaka barrier. He admired the hand, and wished a little more feeling had gone into the words.
"Shaking off" names her resolve to cut everything loose. The Suzuka is a river on the road to Ise, taking the journey itself into the poem. "The waves of eighty shallows" is the many fords, and the plain fact that crossing wets one's sleeves is laid over their being wet with tears. Binding the real landscape of a journey to a state of feeling in a single word is one of this chapter's habitual moves.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Whether at the waves of the Suzuka's shallows my sleeves wet or not, who will there be to send me a thought as far as Ise
- I would gaze after the way that she has gone now— so this autumn, mists, do not stand between me and the hill of Osaka there