昔こそまづ忘られね住吉の
神のしるしを見るにつけても
神のしるしを見るにつけても
- Roma-ji
-
Mukashi koso mazu wasurarene Sumiyoshi no
kami no shirushi o miru ni tsukete mo - English Translation
-
It is the old days
that I cannot forget first,
even as I stand
looking on the plain proof of
the god of Sumiyoshi
- Meaning
- It is the old days I cannot forget first of all, even as I stand here looking on the plain proof of the god of Sumiyoshi.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Wakana Ge
The sacred music went on before the shrine all night, and morning came. The frost lay deeper and deeper, and everything was white. Amid the splendid procession and the sound of the instruments, the Akashi nun alone was going back over the years on the Akashi shore—sending her daughter to the capital, giving her granddaughter up to Murasaki no Ue, serving without ever being able to say who she was. This pilgrimage had answered all of it. She spoke this poem almost to herself. Afterward Murasaki no Ue and the others took the frost as their subject and sang in turn, and the scene turned toward brightness.
"The old days" are the years at Akashi. "Cannot forget first" says that the past rises before the splendor in front of her. "The plain proof of the god" is the working of the god made visible. To have the memory of hardship come first while standing in the middle of a triumph is common to all the poems of this family, and it keeps the pilgrimage from being only a festival.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Who else, knowing what has passed, would come and speak now to the pine that stands here at Sumiyoshi, grown old since the age of the gods
- That Suminoe is a shore where a life has been worth the living—this the nun who has grown old here will know, perhaps, only today
- The frost that has come deep in the night to settle on Suminoe's pines— is it a garland of white mulberry the god has hung
- On the sacred leaves the shrine servants hold up now in their own two hands, white mulberry has been hung— the frost of the deep night