逢ふことのかたきを今日に限らずは
今幾世をか嘆きつつ経む
今幾世をか嘆きつつ経む
- Roma-ji
-
Au koto no kataki o kyō ni kagirazu wa
ima ikuyo o ka nagekitsutsu hemu - English Translation
-
If this hardness of
our meeting is not something
bounded by today,
then how many lives to come
must I go on grieving through
- Meaning
- If the hardness of our meeting is not a thing of today alone, through how many lives to come must I go on grieving?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Sakaki
After the Retired Emperor's death, Fujitsubo, anxious for the Heir Apparent and above all afraid that Genji's obsession would come to light, went so far as to have prayers said to be free of him. But on one occasion he laid his plans deeply and got near her, and she found herself facing him as in a dream. Shut into a storeroom through the day, he came into the curtained bed at night and spoke this poem to a woman who would not yield. She answered, and at daybreak he went out barely in his right mind.
"The hardness of meeting" is the difficulty of coming together. "Not bounded by today" assumes that the difficulty will go on. "Ikuyo" is a number of existences including lives to come, resting on the Buddhist idea of rebirth. By casting a refusal in this life as grief running on into the next, he insists that the bond will not end—which for Fujitsubo makes the words as heavy as they could be.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Leaving you behind in a lodging of dew on a plain of low reeds, it is the storm on all sides that gives my heart no quiet