With this life of mine,
which I would not grudge at all,
I would buy the right
to hold back for a little
the parting here before me

Meaning

With this life of mine, which I would not grudge, I would buy a little delay for the parting that is here before me.

Commentary

Part One: Suma

　Murasaki no Ue answered his poem with this one. She does not value her life, she says, and would trade it to put off this parting even a little. Genji thought it only natural and could hardly leave her, but full daylight would have been awkward and he went in haste. Afterward she was so sunk in grief that she could not get up.

　"A life I would not grudge" takes up his own "life." "Kaete" is in exchange for. "The parting before my eyes" is the one happening now, not some future one. Where he named the error in the premise of their vow, she confines herself to this single moment, so that the two poems pair the abstract with the immediate.

Author

Murasaki Shikibu

Source

Genji Monogatari

Other

It is hard that they bloom and scatter so quickly, but as spring goes on, come back and look once again on the flowering city here
Not knowing that there are partings even in life, we made our promise, and I set the term of my own life by another's life
More than that man who left his name behind him in the land of Cathay, shall I make my dwelling where no one knows where I have gone
Though the mist that lies on the ridge shuts off from me the home I have left, is the sky I gaze upon the same cloud-realm even so

With this life of mine, which I would not grudge at all, I would buy the right to hold back for a little the parting here before me

With this life of mine,
which I would not grudge at all,
I would buy the right
to hold back for a little
the parting here before me