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

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

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