消えがてにふるぞ悲しきかきくらし
わが身それとも思ほえぬ世に
わが身それとも思ほえぬ世に
- Roma-ji
-
Kiegate ni furu zo kanashiki kakikurashi
waga mi sore to mo omooenu yo ni - English Translation
-
Unable to melt,
I go on falling, and that
is the sorrow—all
darkened over, in a world
where I do not feel myself
- Meaning
- Unable to melt away, I go on falling, and that is my sorrow—all darkened over, in a world where I cannot feel myself to be myself.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Miotsukushi
The former Priestess answered his poem with this one. She shrank badly from replying, but her women pressed her, saying a proxy's hand would be improper, and she wrote on grey mourning paper with the ink shaded to blend with it. The diffident hand was open and unforced; not accomplished, but with a delicacy and breeding about it. Genji resolved to take her as a ward and in time to send her to court.
"Kiegate ni" is being unable to melt, as sleet that reaches the ground and does not vanish. "Furu" plays falling against passing one's days. "Kakikurashi" is everything going dark. Some read the word for sleet inside "my own self." Melting, falling, and darkening all belong to sleet: she takes the weather he offered and turns it onto her own life. As the first poem she speaks in her own voice in the tale, it carries considerable weight.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- This travelling robe, as wet with dew as it was in the days gone by— the name of Tamino isle is no rain-cape to hide it
- In a sky where snow and sleet fall without a break, the one who is gone must be flying overhead— and sad is that house to think
- The jewelled vine whose strands I trusted would not slack— and now, past all thought, it has come away from me and hangs apart, cut adrift
- Though the jewelled vine be severed, it will not end; by the gods who guard the offerings on the road I go, I will swear it so