山賤の庵に焚けるしばしばも
言問ひ来なむ恋ふる里人
言問ひ来なむ恋ふる里人
- Roma-ji
-
Yamagatsu no io ni takeru shibashiba mo
kototoi konamu kouru satobito - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- As often as the brushwood burns in these mountain huts, so often would I have the people of home I long for come and call.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
As the months at Suma went on, Genji found much harder to bear, but reflected that he could hardly send for Murasaki no Ue to share a life he himself found wretched. Smoke rising close by, which he had taken for the fisherfolk burning salt, turned out to be brushwood being smoked on the hill behind, and the oddity of it drew this poem. Winter followed, with scenes of koto and flute in falling snow.
"Yamagatsu" is a rustic of the hills. "Shibashiba" plays the burning of brushwood against the sense of again and again, taking the smoke in front of him straight into the poem. "Would come and call" is a wish. "Satobito" are the people of the capital. The gap between a courtier's imagined salt-smoke and the actual brushwood becomes the pun itself, and the poem conveys what daily life in exile was really like.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- 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
- 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
- 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
- At a dawn like this, when the plovers with their friends cry all in one voice, even a bed where I wake alone seems something to trust