嘆きつつわが世はかくて過ぐせとや
胸のあくべき時ぞともなく
胸のあくべき時ぞともなく
- Roma-ji
-
Nagekitsutsu waga yo wa kakute suguse to ya
mune no akubeki toki zo to mo naku - English Translation
-
Am I to pass all
of this life of mine like this,
grieving as I go,
with never once an hour when
the heart in me may be eased
- Meaning
- Am I to spend my whole life this way, grieving, with never an hour when the heart is eased?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Sakaki
Genji answered her poem with this one. Leaving in disquiet through the mist of a moonlit daybreak, dressed down and careful as he was, he was still beyond compare to look at. The Fujiwara Lesser Captain, brother of the Joganden Consort, saw him from behind a screen fence. Genji passed by without knowing it, and the sighting would later be used against him.
"Nagekitsutsu" is grieving without stop. "My world" is his whole life. "The heart being eased" plays on the verb for day breaking, taking up her "day has come." A poem spoken on the morning after a meeting, it says nothing at all of joy and casts the matter as a lifelong grief—the exhaustion of a man piling one forbidden love on another.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The year comes to its end, the rock spring's water too is bound shut with ice, and the faces we once saw are fading away as well
- It is my own heart that wets my sleeves on both counts— and this too, this voice that calls out to let us know the night is breaking open
- If this hardness of our meeting is not something bounded by today, then how many lives to come must I go on grieving through
- Though you leave behind for me a bitterness that lasts through lives to come, know at the same time that your own heart is a faithless thing