心から常世を捨てて鳴く雁を
雲のよそにも思ひけるかな
雲のよそにも思ひけるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Kokoro kara tokoyo o sutete naku kari o
kumo no yoso ni mo omoikeru kana - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- The geese that left the eternal land of their own accord and cry as they fly—how remote, like clouds, I once thought them.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
The Minbu no Taifu followed Yoshikiyo with this poem. He had once watched the geese migrate as something that had nothing to do with him, he says, and now he and the others are in exactly that position. Those gathered there were the four or five men who had followed Genji without regard for which way the world was turning.
"Kokoro kara" is of one's own accord. "Tokoyo" is the eternal land from which migratory birds come, here the place one started from. "Kumo no yoso" is beyond the clouds, the standard figure for another person's business. Laying the geese, who left home by their own choosing, over Genji's voluntary withdrawal to Suma, the poem quietly accepts his lord's decision from a retainer's vantage.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Even the wild geese that have left the eternal land for strange sky here take some comfort while they keep from falling out of the line
- While I look at it I am comforted a while, though the moon's city, where I shall meet them again, lies far off from here indeed