あひ見ずてしのぶるころの涙をも
なべての空の時雨とや見る
なべての空の時雨とや見る
- Roma-ji
-
Aimizute shinoburu koro no namida o mo
nabete no sora no shigure to ya miru - English Translation
-
Do you take the tears
of these days when we do not
meet and I hold back
for nothing more than the rain
that falls from a common sky
- Meaning
- Do you take the tears of these days apart, when I hold myself back, for no more than the showers of an ordinary sky?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Sakaki
Genji answered her poem with this, taking some trouble over it. The women in attendance nudged each other over the elegance of it—the Chinese paper, the freshly chosen brush—wondering whom it could be for. The text notes that there were many such correspondences, and that Genji answered them all civilly enough without any of it reaching him deeply.
"Not meeting" is plain enough; "shinoburu" carries both enduring and keeping out of sight. "The showers of a common sky" takes up the season of her poem. Asking that one's tears not be confused with seasonal rain is a standard move in a love poem; what the scene is actually about is the elegance with which the standard move is executed.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The light of the moon has not changed from autumns past of the world we knew, and it is the mist between that is hard and cruel here
- While I waited on, at every blowing of the withering wind, days of not knowing how you were have gone by, and gone by since
- This day of parting has come round to us again, but the one I knew— when may I count on the time when I shall go and meet her
- To go on living is a wretched thing, and yet, the year coming round, today I feel as though I had met that world once again