一人ゐて嘆きしよりは海人の住む
かたをかくてぞ見るべかりける
かたをかくてぞ見るべかりける
- Roma-ji
-
Hitori ite nagekishi yori wa ama no sumu
kata o kakute zo mirubekarikeru - English Translation
-
Rather than sitting
alone and grieving, I should
have looked on it thus—
the shore, laid out like this, where
the fisherfolk make their home
- Meaning
- Rather than sitting alone and grieving, I should have looked on it like this—the shore where the fisherfolk live, laid out before me.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Eawase
Before the contest in the Emperor's presence, Genji had the cabinets of old and new paintings opened and, with Murasaki no Ue, chose what to send. He took out too the box of the travel diary he had painted at Suma and Akashi, and showed it to her for the first time. The pictures could move even those who knew nothing to tears, and the two who remembered those days recalled them with fresh grief. When she reproached him for never having shown them, he spoke this poem. She answered.
"Hitori ite" is remaining alone, her life in the capital while he was at Suma. "The shore where the fisherfolk live" is Suma and Akashi. "To look on it thus" is to see it now in pictures. "Bekari keru" laments what would have been better. The exchange sets the real grief of that parting against reliving it now through pictures, and the role the diary plays in this chapter is shown in the poem.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- To the eye it may have grown worn, grown old with shore and years—but shall we sink the name of the fisher of Ise, aged as it is?
- More even than at the time I knew that wretched grief, today once more the tears turn back toward the days that are gone and past now
- My body is thus now outside the sacred rope, yet the heart I held within me in those days of old I have not once forgotten