雲近く飛び交ふ鶴も空に見よ
我は春日の曇りなき身ぞ
我は春日の曇りなき身ぞ
- Roma-ji
-
Kumo chikaku tobikau tazu mo sora ni mi yo
ware wa haruhi no kumori naki mi zo - English Translation
-
You cranes that fly and
cross up there so near the clouds,
look down from the sky:
I am a man as free of
cloud as a day in springtime
- Meaning
- You cranes crossing up there near the clouds, look down from the sky: I am as free of cloud as a spring day.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Suma
The sun climbed and the Consultant had to hurry away. Watching him go, looking back again and again, was harder than the visit had been worth. When he asked when they might meet again, Genji answered with this poem. He went on to say that even the wise men of old had found it hard to return to the world once they had withdrawn, and that he did not expect to see the capital again.
"Cranes crossing near the clouds" are those in high place at court. "Look down from the sky" claims that from above his innocence would be plain. "As free of cloud as a spring day" states that innocence directly. He uses the form of an appeal to heaven for vindication, and the words that follow show a complicated mind: he leans on the hope and expects nothing from it.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- In what spring shall I go and look upon the home I came from once more— the ones I envy are these wild geese that are going back
- Not having had my fill, I part from this dwelling of the geese and go— shall I lose my way upon the road to the flowered town
- In a cloud-realm with nothing to take hold of, I cry out here alone, longing all the while for the friend whose wing lay beside mine
- Come drifting out to a plain of open sea I had never known, is my sorrow of one kind here, and only of one kind now