亡き人の別れやいとど隔たらむ
煙となりし雲居ならでは
煙となりし雲居ならでは
- Roma-ji
-
Naki hito no wakare ya itodo hedataramu
keburi to narishi kumoi narade wa - English Translation
-
Will the parting from
the one already dead grow
further still, unless
it be in that cloud-realm where
she rose and became the smoke
- Meaning
- Will our parting from the dead grow further still—unless it be in that sky where she rose as smoke?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
Omiya answered his poem with this one. If he goes to Suma seeking her daughter's smoke, she says, he will not find her short of the sky that smoke went up into: consolation that refuses to console. Those who saw him off wept until the aftermath seemed almost ill-omened. Genji then returned to the Nijo residence to take leave of Murasaki no Ue.
"The one already dead" is Aoi no Ue. "Hedataramu" is the widening of a distance: with Genji gone far off, even the dead daughter seems to recede. "Kumoi" is the sky where the clouds are, where the smoke of the pyre went. He had used smoke to link two places; she answers that only the sky itself could link them, and by refusing the consolation she shows how deep the grief goes.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- At a house gone wild where no one comes to see it, it is the orange bloom alone that has become the eaves' one reason to call
- Wondering whether it might resemble the smoke that burned at Toribe, I go to see the shore where the fisherfolk burn their salt
- Though this body goes wandering away like this, the reflected face in the mirror that does not leave your side will not leave you
- If, even parted, at least the reflected face were to stay behind, then I might look in the glass and take some comfort from it