かけまくはかしこけれどもそのかみの
秋思ほゆる木綿欅かな
秋思ほゆる木綿欅かな
- Roma-ji
-
Kakemaku wa kashikokeredomo sonokami no
aki omooyuru yūdasuki kana - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- It is a fearful thing even to speak of, and yet this mulberry cord brings back to me that autumn long ago.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Sakaki
From his retreat, Genji wrote also to the Asagao princess, now High Priestess of Kamo, on the excuse that the wind blew between them. To Chujo no Kimi, who carried the letters, he sent reproaches; to the princess herself this poem. He wrote on pale green Chinese paper and had it delivered with mulberry cloth tied to a sakaki branch, in a suitably sacred style. Her reply came written on the edge of the cloth, and he was moved by how her hand too had improved.
"Fearful even to speak of" is a fixed formula from the language of the rites. "Yufudasuki" is the mulberry cord worn over the shoulder at ceremonies, a word chosen for her office. "That autumn long ago" is the previous autumn at the Shrine in the Fields. He forces through the impropriety of sending a love poem to a woman consecrated to a god by wrapping it in the vocabulary of the rites—and the text itself calls the habit unbecoming.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Is it mist that stands between us in this ninefold palace, that the moon above the clouds should be so far off when I think of it