いにしへを吹き伝へたる笛竹に
さへづる鳥の音さへ変らぬ
さへづる鳥の音さへ変らぬ
- Roma-ji
-
Inishie o fukitsutaetaru fuetake ni
saezuru tori no ne sae kawaranu - English Translation
-
In the flute that breathes
and carries the old days on,
and in the singing
of the birds as well—nothing,
nothing at all has changed
- Meaning
- The flute breathes on the music of the old days, and even the song of the birds is what it always was—nothing here has changed at all.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Otome
This poem was offered with the cup to the reigning Emperor by Genji's younger brother, once Viceroy and now Minister of War. Genji's poem had looked back with longing to the reign of the Kiritsubo Emperor, and the Retired Emperor's had lamented his own reduced circumstances; left so, the exchange came close to a reproach against the present reign. The Prince turned it aside by declaring that nothing was in any way less fine than before. His delivery was admirable, and his tact, we are told, quite out of the common; and His Majesty took the cup and answered him.
"Inishie," the old days, means here the beauty of the music at the banquet of flowers in the Kiritsubo Emperor's reign. "Fuetake" is the flute, or music generally. "The song of the birds" renders the strains of Shun'oden. The particle "sae," meaning even, piles one upon the other—not the flute alone but the birds too—to insist that nothing has altered. Where the two poems before had leaned toward longing for the past and grief for the present, this one restores the company by saying that the present reign is in no way the lesser. It shows how a poem at such a gathering is never mere elegance, but carries its measure of politics as well.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The warbler's singing— that song is as it was then, but the blossoms' shade where once we made merry is wholly changed from before
- Even to this house, set off from the ninefold court by a veil of haze, they have come to tell of spring— the voices of the warblers
- If the warbler sings out of longing for the past, can it be because the blossoms it moves among have faded from what they were?
- You who by your own choosing wait for spring—look, then, at least on these leaves of my garden's autumn, sent to you by way of the wind