玉かづら絶えてもやまじ行く道の
たむけの神もかけてちかはむ
たむけの神もかけてちかはむ
- Roma-ji
-
Tamakazura taete mo yamaji yuku michi no
tamuke no kami mo kakete chikawamu - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Though the jewelled vine be cut, my feeling will not end; by the wayside gods of the road I travel, I swear it.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Yomogiu
Jiju answered her lady's poem with this one. Her old nurse's dying charge went without saying, she told her, and they had endured hard years together, and now she was being drawn away on an unlooked-for journey; how long she would live she could not say. Hurried into the carriage by the aunt, she looked back again and again. After this only useless old women remained in the house, and a winter came that buried it in snow.
"Tamakazura" takes up her lady's word, keeping the etiquette of exchange, and "severed" belongs to the same vine. "The god of offerings" is the wayside deity who guards travellers, marking her as the one setting out. "Kakete" belongs to the vine as well while also meaning to keep in mind and to swear upon. Her lady grieved that the bond was breaking; she answers that the form may break but the feeling will not.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Unable to melt, I go on falling, and that is the sorrow—all darkened over, in a world where I do not feel myself
- 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
- My sleeve has no time to dry, longing as it does for the one who's gone, and now the drops from these eaves in ruin are added too
- Seek it out I shall— I of all men will go in and ask after it: the heart of old at the root of mugwort too deep for paths