涙河浮かぶ水泡も消えぬべし
流れて後の瀬をも待たずて
流れて後の瀬をも待たずて
- Roma-ji
-
Namidagawa ukabu minawa mo kienubeshi
nagarete nochi no se o mo matazute - English Translation
-
The bubble afloat
on the river of tears will
surely vanish soon,
not waiting for the shallows
that come after the current
- Meaning
- The bubble on this river of tears will surely vanish, without waiting for the shallows that lie downstream.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
Oborozukiyo answered his poem with this one. She will be gone, she says, before any day of meeting comes—despair stated plainly. The hand, written in disorder through her weeping, was fine all the same. Genji thought of asking to see her once more, but remembering what the affair had already cost he did not press it.
"River of tears" and "shoal" both take up his own words, keeping the etiquette of exchange. "Minawa" is a bubble on water, long used for a life that will not last. "The shallows further down" plays the course of the river against a later meeting. Where he asked about the past that brought them here, she denies the future, and the two poems divide the tense between them.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- Was it sinking down into that river of tears with no shoal to meet, that made the beginning of the channel I drift along
- The ones I once knew are gone, and those who remain grieve—at the world's end I pass my days weeping, with nothing gained by leaving it
- At that first parting I thought all grief had been used up and gone from me, and here again the sorrow of this world has grown the more