こりずまの浦のみるめのゆかしきを
塩焼く海人やいかが思はむ
塩焼く海人やいかが思はむ
- Roma-ji
-
Korizuma no ura no mirume no yukashiki o
shio yaku ama ya ikaga omowamu - English Translation
-
That I long to see
the seaweed of that shore where
I have not learned yet,
what will the fisherfolk who
burn the salt make of it now
- Meaning
- That I still long, unchastened, for a sight of the seaweed of that bay—what will the salt-burning fisherfolk make of it?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
Genji wrote to Oborozukiyo as well, dressing the letter up as a private note to Chunagon no Kimi. It says that even though the affair had brought him here, his heart had not turned from her. This poem went with it, and a short reply came folded into Chunagon no Kimi's letter. Hearing how she grieved, Genji wept.
"Korizuma" means unchastened, and plays on the place-name Suma—one of the better-known bits of wordplay in this chapter. "Mirume" is a seaweed whose name also means eyes that see, hence meeting, a pun used in earlier chapters too. "The salt-burning fisherfolk" is himself at Suma. That a man who ought to have learned his lesson has not is said lightly, through a single pun on a place-name, so that a grave situation is wrapped in a jesting tone.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- How does it go now with the fisher's rush-thatched hut at Matsushima, at a season when the man of Suma's shore is in tears
- Making a trade of weeping until her sleeves drip, the fisherwoman grown old at Matsushima heaps her own griefs up as well
- Since it is a love that even the fisherfolk burning on the shore keep hidden, the smoke of it smolders with nowhere to go