風吹けばまづぞ乱るる色変はる
浅茅が露にかかるささがに
浅茅が露にかかるささがに
- Roma-ji
-
Kaze fukeba mazu zo midaruru iro kawaru
asaji ga tsuyu ni kakaru sasagani - English Translation
-
When the wind blows, first
of all the thing to be thrown
into disarray
is the spider on the dew
of reeds whose color turns now
- Meaning
- When the wind blows, the first thing thrown into disarray is the spider's thread on the dew of reeds already changing color.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Sakaki
Murasaki no Ue answered his poem on white paper with this one and nothing else. Brief as it was, Genji murmured to himself that her hand kept improving, and smiled over it with real tenderness. Since they wrote constantly, her writing much resembled his own, with something more graceful and womanly added.
"Sasagani" is an old word for a spider, or a spider's thread. "The dew on low reeds" takes up his own words, keeping the etiquette of exchange. "Changing color" is grass withering, with a changeable human heart folded in. She likens herself to the frailest thing available—a thread of web on a bead of dew—and states the precariousness of her position without a word of reproach.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- To speak of it is a thing to be feared, and yet this mulberry cord brings back to mind that autumn of the days that are long gone
- And that autumn, then— what was it that happened there, that a cord like this should be laid upon your heart and remembered as it is