惜しからぬ命に代へて目の前の
別れをしばしとどめてしがな
別れをしばしとどめてしがな
- Roma-ji
-
Oshikaranu inochi ni kaete me no mae no
wakare o shibashi todometeshigana - English Translation
-
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