明けぬ夜にやがてまどへる心には
いづれを夢とわきて語らむ
いづれを夢とわきて語らむ
- Roma-ji
-
Akenu yo ni yagate madoeru kokoro ni wa
izure o yume to wakite kataramu - English Translation
-
To a heart that goes
astray in a night that has
not yet come to dawn,
which of these is dream and which
is not, that it might be told?
- Meaning
- To a heart still lost in a night that never dawns, which of these is the dream and which is not, that I could tell them apart?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Akashi
Akashi no Kimi answered his poem with this one. Taking over his word for dream, she says she cannot tell dream from waking in the first place. For a woman who has brooded so long on the distance in rank between them, what is happening in front of her does not feel real. After this poem their connection begins.
"A night that does not dawn" is the state of a mind in the dark. "Madoeru" is still going astray. "Which of these is the dream" returns his own word. "To tell apart and say" is exactly that. He wished to half wake from a dream; she answers that she cannot see the waking world to begin with, and the two poems divide the word between them.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Moon-dappled horse of this autumn night, gallop up to the cloud-realm that I long for, so that I may see it even a moment
- If only there were someone to share close talk with, that the dream I have of this wretched world might come half awake from itself here
- Wet through with brine, I find myself weeping first of all—though the seaweed glimpsed in passing was no more than a fisher's idle sport
- How without guile I believed it, that promise we made to each other— that the waves would never cross over the pines and beyond