そのかみの老木はむべも朽ちぬらむ
植ゑし小松も苔生ひにけり
植ゑし小松も苔生ひにけり
- Roma-ji
-
Sonokami no oiki wa mube mo kuchinuramu
ueshi komatsu mo koke oinikeri - English Translation
-
The old tree of those
days has rotted away, no doubt,
and well it might—for
even the young pine we planted
has grown its coat of moss
- Meaning
- The old tree of those days has rotted away, no doubt, and well it might—for even the young pine we planted has grown its moss.
- Commentary
-
Part One: Fujiura
Overcome by the scattered practice poems, the Chancellor said that he would like to ask the stream what was in its heart, but that an old man should hold his tongue against ill-omened words; and he made this poem. It answers the exchange in which his daughter and son-in-law had mourned the late Princess. For him the Sanjo house was where he himself had grown up, and to see his daughter and her husband now making their home there moved him deeply.
"Sono kami" is those days, that time. "The old tree" is the Princess. "Mube mo" is no wonder, fittingly. "Kuchinuramu" is: it will have decayed. "The young pine we planted" is himself. It is only right that the old tree should be gone, he says, since even the pine that stands for his own younger self has moss upon it now; and so he sets his mother's death beside his own aging. Where the young couple asked the water about the dead, he answers with trees—old timber and young pine—and takes the turning of the generations quietly to heart. After his long contest of wills with Yugiri, this shared mourning for the one who raised them quietly seals the peace between the two houses.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- You are the master here, who keeps this house—clear spring that seeps through the rocks, do you know where she has gone, the one we used to see here?
- It does not so much as show me the vanished one's reflection—flowing unconcerned, and at its ease, this shallow garden stream
- On both of them alike I lean for shade—these pines whose roots have been entwined since they were two green shoots, on to the far ends of their boughs
- The hedge chrysanthemum, its color deepening now, seems to long, at times, for that autumn long ago when we danced with trailing sleeves