をちかへりえぞ忍ばれぬほととぎす
ほの語らひし宿の垣根に
ほの語らひし宿の垣根に
- Roma-ji
-
Ochikaeri e zo shinobarenu hototogisu
hono katarai shi yado no kakine ni - English Translation
-
Turning back again
I cannot help but recall,
cuckoo that you are,
this hedge of the house where once
we spoke a word together
- Meaning
- Turning back to the past, I cannot help remembering—cuckoo, at the hedge of this house where once we exchanged a word or two.
- Commentary
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Part One: Hanachirusato
With private cares compounded by the state of the world, Genji had grown low in spirits. He set out in a break in the summer rains to call on the Reikeiden Consort, one of the late Kiritsubo Emperor's ladies, and her younger sister. Passing Nakagawa on the way, he heard a koto from a modest house, and a cuckoo called from a great katsura tree. Recognizing a house he had once visited, he sent Koremitsu with this poem. What came back was a curt single verse.
"Ochikaeri" is to turn back to an earlier time, the motion of a mind going into the past. The cuckoo, an early-summer bird, appears constantly in older poetry as something that brings the past to mind. Here it is both the bird calling in front of him and Genji himself, come again after long absence. "Spoke only a word or two" concedes that theirs was never a deep connection, which keeps the approach modest.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- In this first blossom that opened up this morning, a thing one would wish for oneself, I see a glow that yields nothing to your own
- Out of season, this bloom that opened this morning seems to have been made to droop by the summer rain before it could show its glow
- The cuckoo's voice that comes calling and asking is the same voice, and yet how hard it is to be sure under a sky of long rains
- Finding the fragrance of the orange dear to it, the cuckoo has come, seeking out and calling on this village of fallen bloom