うらなくも思ひけるかな契りしを
松より浪は越えじものぞと
松より浪は越えじものぞと
- Roma-ji
-
Uranaku mo omoikeru kana chigirishi o
matsu yori nami wa koeji mono zo to - English Translation
-
How without guile I
believed it, that promise we
made to each other—
that the waves would never cross
over the pines and beyond
- Meaning
- How trustingly I believed our promise—that the waves would never cross over the pines.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Akashi
Murasaki no Ue answered his poem with this one, reproaching him plainly through an old poem: had he not sworn he would never change? It is the only poem in this chapter in which she takes him to task directly, and it told on him: his visits to Akashi grew further apart afterward.
"Uranaku" is without suspicion, openly, and carries the word for bay, using his own coastal vocabulary against him. "Chigirishi" is the promise made. "The waves will not cross the pines" draws on the old poem about the pines of Sue no Matsuyama, long a figure for a heart that cannot change. He had made the affair a fisherfolk's diversion; she answers in the same sea vocabulary with the breaking of a vow.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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?
- 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
- 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
- Though thoughts burn in me like the weed the fisherfolk rake up and set fire, now there is no shell of worth and I will not even blame