しほしほとまづぞ泣かるるかりそめの
みるめはあまのすさびなれども
みるめはあまのすさびなれども
- Roma-ji
-
Shioshio to mazu zo nakaruru karisome no
mirume wa ama no susabi naredomo - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Soaked with brine, I find myself weeping before anything else—though that seaweed glimpsed in passing was only a fisherman's idle amusement.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Akashi
Unable to keep the matter hidden, Genji confessed it himself in a letter to Murasaki no Ue. The letter, meant to soothe her, admits fault while insisting nothing much has happened, and this poem went with it. She sent back the most direct answer she makes in this chapter.
"Shioshio" is the drooping of one soaked in tears, with the sound of brine in it. "Karisome" is passing or momentary, playing on the word for cutting. "Mirume" is the seaweed whose name also means eyes that see, hence meeting, a pun used in earlier chapters. "Ama no susabi" is a fisherfolk's diversion, and sounds the word for nun as well. The coastal vocabulary carried from the Suma chapter is turned straight into an excuse for infidelity, and the character of the poem lies in exactly that.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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?
- How without guile I believed it, that promise we made to each other— that the waves would never cross over the pines and beyond
- Though on this journey we are parting and I go, the smoke that rises from the burning of seaweed will drift toward the same place