身を変へて一人帰れる山里に
聞きしに似たる松風ぞ吹く
聞きしに似たる松風ぞ吹く
- Roma-ji
-
Mi o kaete hitori kaereru yamazato ni
kikishi ni nitaru matsukaze zo fuku - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Now a nun and changed, I have come back alone to this mountain home, where the wind in the pines blows with a sound like the one I knew long ago.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Matsukaze
The Novice of Akashi resolved to send his daughter, her mother the nun, and the little girl born to her and Genji up to the capital. He himself stayed behind at Akashi, and the family moved to an old villa on the bank of the Oi River. The place had belonged to the nun's grandfather, Prince Nakatsukasa, and had been repaired after falling into ruin. Come back to it after all these years, the nun listened to the pines around her and, remembering the past, spoke this poem.
"Changed in this body" tells of taking vows and altering her form as a nun. Her circumstances and her whole condition are utterly unlike the days when she lived in the capital. "The pine wind like the one I knew" is the sound heard here long ago, set against a self so wholly changed—only the wind in the pines keeps its old voice. In a sound of nature unaltered through years of wandering, the poem lays the memory of days long gone.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- By this music of the koto, unchanged from when we made our promise— did you come to know how far my heart runs on without end