しめのうちは昔にあらぬ心地して
神代のことも今ぞ恋しき
神代のことも今ぞ恋しき
- Roma-ji
-
Shime no uchi wa mukashi ni aranu kokochi shite
kamiyo no koto mo ima zo koishiki - English Translation
-
Within the sacred
rope it feels no longer as
it was in the past,
and those days of the gods' age
now, even now, I long for
- Meaning
- Within the sacred rope it feels no longer as it once was, and those days of the age of gods I long for now, even now.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Eawase
The former Priestess answered the Retired Emperor's poem with this one. Since it would be unkind not to reply, she broke off a little of the end of a hair-pin she had used in the old days, wrapped it in pale blue Chinese paper, and sent it, though it troubled her. The gift to the messenger was elegant. Seeing it, the Retired Emperor was moved beyond measure, wished he could take back the days now gone, and even felt some grievance against Genji.
"Within the sacred rope" answers his "outside the sacred rope," meaning her life as a Priestess in the god's service. "No longer as it was" is a heart changed from before. "The age of the gods" figures her Priestess years as a mythic past. "Even now I long for it" is just that. Where he wrote of a body outside the rope, she answers by longing for the days within it, so that two who share that sacred past exchange poems with that time as their pivot.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- Changed in this body, I have come back alone to the hills, where the wind through the pines blows with a sound like the one I knew before
- Longing in vain for the friends of the world I knew back in my old home, I twitter on—but who is there to tell what I would say