舟人もたれを恋ふとか大島の
うらかなしげに声の聞こゆる
うらかなしげに声の聞こゆる
- Roma-ji
-
Funabito mo tare o kou to ka Ōshima no
urakanashige ni koe no kikoyuru - English Translation
-
Whom do they long for,
these boatmen, that from the bay
of Oshima
their voices should carry so,
sounding of sorrow to us
- Meaning
- Whom can the boatmen be longing for, that from the bay of Oshima their voices should reach us sounding so of sorrow?
- Commentary
-
Part One: Tamakazura
After Yugao's sudden death, the little girl left behind in the western city—the future Tamakazura—waited for a mother who never came, since Ukon, bound by Genji's charge of silence, sent no word. Then the husband of the child's nurse was appointed Deputy Governor of Dazaifu, and the nurse went down to Tsukushi with the girl, then four. No search turned up any trace of the mother, and there was no way to tell the father, the Minister of the Center; and when they put the child aboard a poorly appointed boat and rowed out, it was pitiful indeed. Each time the girl asked in her innocence whether they were going to her mother, their tears began again, and though they warned one another that tears aboard ship are ill-omened, they wept all the same, gazing at the Inland Sea and remembering their lost lady. Then the boatmen sang out roughly, and the nurse's two daughters, facing each other, wept and exchanged poems, of which this is one.
"Funabito" are the men who work the boat. "Oshima" is taken to be the island of that name off Chikuzen, and "the bay (ura) of Oshima" plays on the "ura" of "ura-ganashi," a vague sorrow. In hearing the boatmen's rough song as the cry of someone longing, the poet shows us her own heart. What she longs for is the vanished Yugao, and without naming her she places the grief in the singing that carries across the bay. Weaving a place name into a pivot word is the manner of travel poems; here the loneliness of a party carrying a small child far to the west dissolves into the sea itself. With this boat song the chapter opens its tale of wandering.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- Leaves that scatter on the wind are light things indeed— the color of spring is what you should look upon, hung on the pine at the rock's root
- Out on open sea, with no knowing whence we came nor where we are bound— ah, toward what quarter now are we to long for you?
- If ever my heart should turn away from you, then by the god enshrined at the mirror shrine of Matsura let me swear my oath to you