心ありて引き手の綱のたゆたはば
うち過ぎましや須磨の浦波
うち過ぎましや須磨の浦波
- Roma-ji
-
Kokoro arite hikite no tsuna no tayutawaba
uchisugimashi ya Suma no uranami - English Translation
-
If the towing rope
in the hand had wavered from
a heart that felt it,
would you have passed on by these
waves on the shore of Suma
- Meaning
- If the rope in your hands really wavered from a feeling heart, would you have gone past the waves of Suma at all?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
Genji answered her with this poem, turning it aside lightly: a heart that truly felt it would not have gone by. The smile with which he read her letter was beautiful enough to make one shy. At the foot he added that he had not thought to go fishing here. The narrator closes by saying that the wish to stay was stronger in her than in the man of the old story who left a poem with a post-station master.
"Kokoro arite" is having the feeling to understand, taking up her "wavering heart." "The rope in the hand" returns her "towing rope." "If it wavered" is a condition. "Would you have passed by?" is a rhetorical question. Using the rope imagery she set up, he tests her words against the facts—a neatly finished piece of repartee.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- It is not simply as a wretched thing alone that I feel all this— and so my sleeves are wet on the one side and the other
- The towing rope of our boat, held back and drawn in by the sound of strings— this heart of mine that wavers, do you know any of it
- As often as the brushwood burns in the huts of the mountain people, so often would I have them come, the folk of home I love
- On which of the roads among the clouds shall I too lose my way and go— and it shames me to think that the moon may be watching me