別るとてはるかにいひしひとことも
かへりてものは今ぞかなしき
かへりてものは今ぞかなしき
- Roma-ji
-
Wakaru tote haruka ni iishi hitokoto mo
kaerite mono wa ima zo kanashiki - English Translation
-
Even that one word
you spoke from so far away
at our parting turns
back on itself, and the thing
is sorrowful now indeed
- Meaning
- Even that single word you spoke from far off at our parting turns back on itself now, and the thing is sorrowful indeed.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Eawase
The former Priestess answered the Retired Emperor's poem with this one. Pressed by Genji to reply, she felt great shame, but remembering how graceful and beautiful he had been at the rite before her descent to Ise, and how he had wept, and setting down too the memory of her dead mother Rokujo no Miyasudokoro, she was moved and returned this. Genji longed to see the reply, but could not.
"Wakaru tote" is at parting, meaning the descent to Ise. "Spoke from far off" takes up "do not turn back toward the capital" from the Sakaki chapter. "Hitokoto" is that one word. "Kaerite" plays returning to the capital against turning back on itself. Where his poem raised the rite of the farewell comb, hers takes up the same words to answer, saying that now she is back, the words are sad. The woman who first found her own voice at her mother's death in the Miotsukushi chapter here answers in a public exchange.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The barrier at Ausaka—what kind of a barrier is it, that one must push through a stand of trees so thick with sighing?
- Was it the small comb I set upon your parting road that the god took for pretext, to warn us to a bond as far off as this?
- Without tracing out the deep heart of the sea of Ise, shall the waves wipe it away as a trace grown old and left behind here?
- To a heart that would rise in longing to the realm above the clouds, the thousand-fathom deep itself is a thing seen far below