藤波のうち過ぎがたく見えつるは
まつこそ宿のしるしなりけれ
まつこそ宿のしるしなりけれ
- Roma-ji
-
Fujinami no uchisugigataku mietsuru wa
matsu koso yado no shirushi narikere - English Translation
-
The wisteria
waves seemed hard to pass on by—
it was the pine, and
the waiting, that were the sign
this house had been keeping here
- Meaning
- That the wisteria waves seemed too much to pass by—it was the pine, and the waiting, that marked this house out for me.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Yomogiu
Once inside, Genji said he had been putting her to the test, resenting that she never wrote, but that seeing the mark of the pines he could not pass by. She was as reticent as ever and slow to answer. Since the place made a long stay awkward, he talked his way toward leaving, and moved by the height the pines had reached in years he had not planted them, and by the dreamlike course of his own life at Suma and Akashi, he spoke this poem. She answered.
"Fujinami" is wisteria hanging in wave-like clusters, the sight that stopped him at the gate. "Hard to pass by" is just that. "Matsu" is the pine and also waiting, and it is the hinge of the poem. "Shirushi" is a mark or proof. Drawing on Mitsune's poem about the planter grown old while the pine grew tall, he lays a woman's constancy over the years a tree has taken to grow.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- These years I waited and no sign came of it—my house you pass beside only because the flowers gave you occasion to come
- Going out and now coming back, these tears of mine that will not be dammed— do people take them for the spring that never runs dry here?