伊勢人の波の上漕ぐ小舟にも
うきめは刈らで乗らましものを
うきめは刈らで乗らましものを
- Roma-ji
-
Isebito no nami no ue kogu obune ni mo
ukime wa karade noramashi mono o - English Translation
-
Into that small boat
the people of Ise row
over the waves' backs
I would have climbed, had I not
had this bitter weed to cut
- Meaning
- I would have got into the little boat the Ise people row across the waves, if only there had been no bitter weed to cut.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
Genji answered her letter with this poem. Coming when it did, the letter made even the messenger seem like a friend, and he kept the man two or three days to hear news of Ise. His reply says that had he known he would come to be cut off from the world like this, he would have gone down to Ise in her train. This is one of two poems enclosed with it.
"Ise people" is her party, gone down to Ise. "Ukime" takes up her own word and carries the pun on seaweed and hardship forward. "Without cutting" means without meeting that hardship. Where she wrote of the bitterness she gathers at Ise, he answers that he would have boarded the boat and left it uncut—keeping the same pun while turning it into a counterfactual.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- Think, from that Suma shore where they say the sleeves drip brine, of the woman of Ise who cuts the weed and gathers her bitterness
- On Ise's islands, gathering on the tidal flats when the sea draws back, the one who finds no shell worth having is myself here
- Among the driftwood the fisherfolk heap up, which is grief on grief here, how long shall I sit and gaze, soaked through, on Suma's own shore
- Gazing at the fern that grows on eaves falling more and more to ruin, how thickly the dew comes down and settles on these sleeves here