沈みしも忘れぬものをこりずまに
身も投げつべき宿の藤波
身も投げつべき宿の藤波
- Roma-ji
-
Shizumishi mo wasurenu mono o korizuma ni
mi mo nagetsubeki yado no fujinami - English Translation
-
I have not forgotten
those years I lay sunk away,
and even so, not
learning, I could throw myself
into this house's wisteria
- Meaning
- I have not forgotten the years I lay sunk at Suma, and even so I have learned nothing: I could throw myself into the wisteria pool of this house.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Wakana Jo
Even after he had reached her past the barrier, Genji kept coming. Wisteria was beginning to bloom in the garden, and the old flower banquet once held at this house came back to him. He spoke this poem then: he knows that this was the affair that sent him into exile, and says he still cannot keep away. She answered to turn his ardor aside, but the meetings went on for a time. In the end she resolved to take vows, and what lay between them closes in the following chapter.
"Lay sunk away" is the years adrift at Suma and Akashi, and sinking in water leads to the word for a deep pool. "Not learning" folds the place-name Suma into the phrase for being unchastened, a play these two have used since the Suma chapter. "Wisteria" hangs in clusters and puns on that pool. Sinking, pool, wave, wisteria run through the poem as waterside associations, and inside them he says that, knowing what it cost him, he would go in again.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- Only tears will not be dammed, like the clear spring there at the barrier— but the road where we might meet had long since come to its end
- The pool you would throw yourself into is no true pool at all, and so I shall take no more of these unchastened waves upon me
- Has autumn come now as near to me as all this? While I watched, even the hills that were green with leaves have gone and changed their colors