背きにしこの世に残る心こそ
入る山路のほだしなりけれ
入る山路のほだしなりけれ
- Roma-ji
-
Somukinishi kono yo ni nokoru kokoro koso
iru yamaji no hodashi narikere - English Translation
-
The heart I have left
behind in the world I turned
my back upon—that
is the very tether on
the mountain road I would take
- Meaning
- The heart I left behind in the world I turned my back on is the very tether that holds me on the mountain road I mean to take.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Wakana Jo
Suzaku had taken his vows and shut himself away at a temple in the hills, but he could not put the Third Princess out of his mind. She was young still, and unsure of herself in the place of Genji's principal wife. So he wrote to Murasaki no Ue, who had long ordered the women's quarters at the Rokujo residence, and asked her again to look after the girl. This poem came with that letter. Murasaki answered with his position in mind, and from then on she did in fact take the Princess's care upon herself.
"The world I turned my back upon" is the world he has renounced, and the demonstrative sounds the word for child, folding in his feeling for his daughter. "Tether" is the rope that hobbles a horse, an image for whatever holds back one who means to give himself to the Way. To say that a father's love binds his feet on the mountain road is to say he cannot fully leave. That the woman he entrusts his daughter to is the one who gave up the place of principal wife makes the exchange more tangled still.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- It is not so deep as to close the road that runs between the two of us, and yet it troubles my heart, this thin snow of the morning
- So frail a thing, it must vanish in the middle of the empty sky— this thin snow of the springtime that drifts wherever winds go
- If the world you left lies still uneasy behind, then do not force your way free of the tether that is so hard to part from now
- With all of those years set between us, I have come to Meeting Hill—yet how little I can dam them, these tears that keep on falling