初雁は恋しき人の列なれや
旅の空飛ぶ声の悲しき
旅の空飛ぶ声の悲しき
- Roma-ji
-
Hatsukari wa koishiki hito no tsura nare ya
tabi no sora tobu koe no kanashiki - English Translation
-
Are the first wild geese
a line of the ones I long
for, that their voices
crying as they fly the sky
of travel should be so sad
- Meaning
- Are these first wild geese a line of the people I long for? Their voices crossing the traveller's sky sound so sad.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
On an evening when the garden flowers were at their height, Genji went out to the gallery with a view of the sea and stood there. Boats sang far out on the water, and looking no bigger than small birds afloat they only added to the desolation. Then geese came over in a line, their cries mixed with the sound of oars; Genji wept and spoke this poem, and Yoshikiyo, the Minbu no Taifu, and the former Lieutenant of the Right answered one after another. The men's longing for the capital was eased a little by it.
"Hatsukari" are the first geese of autumn. "A line of the ones I long for" sees the people of the capital in the file of birds. "The sky of travel" joins migratory geese to a man in exile. Behind it lies the old association of the goose as a bearer of letters, but here it is the formation itself in which he sees the faces he misses, and it sets off the four linked poems that follow.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- These waves on the shore, hard to tell from the sound of one who weeps, worn out with longing—is it that the wind blows here from where I long
- Ranged in a line, they bring back to me the way things were in former days, though the geese were never friends of ours in that time at all
- The geese that of their own will left the eternal land and cry as they go—how far off, like clouds, I used to think them from myself