別れても影だにとまるものならば
鏡を見ても慰めてまし
鏡を見ても慰めてまし
- Roma-ji
-
Wakarete mo kage dani tomaru mono naraba
kagami o mite mo nagusametemashi - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- If even the reflection would stay behind after we part, then I might look in the mirror and be comforted.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
Murasaki no Ue answered his poem with this one. A reflection cannot stay in a mirror, she says gently, so it is no comfort at all. Seeing her slip behind a pillar to hide her tears, Genji thought again that of all the women he had known there was no one like her. Afterward he went to take his leave at the Hanachirusato house.
"If at least the reflection would stay" takes up his own "kage" and returns it, as the exchange required. "Mono naraba" is a conditional that assumes the thing will not happen. "I might be comforted" is a contrary-to-fact wish. She takes the figure he offered as consolation and returns it as an impossible condition—consistent, through all these chapters, with a woman who does not simply believe what Genji says.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- Though this body goes wandering away like this, the reflected face in the mirror that does not leave your side will not leave you
- Narrow though it be, this sleeve where the moonlight has come to lodge itself, I would hold and still watch on a light there is no end to
- The moonlight, going its round, will come at the last to shine clear again— do not gaze on at a sky where it is clouded a while