行方なき空の煙となりぬとも
思ふあたりを立ちは離れじ
思ふあたりを立ちは離れじ
- Roma-ji
-
Yukue naki sora no keburi to narinu tomo
omou atari o tachi wa hanareji - English Translation
-
Even if I turn
to smoke in a sky where there
is no way to go,
I will not rise and leave the
place where the one I love is
- Meaning
- Even if I turn to smoke in a sky with nowhere to go, I will not rise and leave the place where the one I love is.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Kashiwagi
Seeing the answer he had not expected, Kashiwagi wept and added this poem. It was the last he ever wrote. Soon afterward the Princess bore her son, and in the weakness that followed she begged to be allowed to take vows. Suzaku came down from the hills in secret one night, went to the Rokujo residence, and over Genji's objections had her shorn on the spot. When word of it reached Kashiwagi he sank further, entrusted the future of his own wife to Yugiri when Yugiri came to see him, and died as quietly as a bubble going out.
"No way to go" is having no fixed direction, and it describes the smoke. "Smoke in a sky" is the pyre's smoke rising. "The place where the one I love is" is where the Third Princess is. "Will not rise and leave" is refusing to go, and the verb belongs to the smoke that has run through all three poems. To say flatly that he will not leave even in death goes past the etiquette of an exchange into attachment itself, and it prepares the ground for his spirit's appearance later in the tale.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- The smoke that will rise when I burn, saying now it ends—even that smoke will not clear, and the longing that does not end will remain
- Let me rise beside you and go out with the smoke, since we are matching smoke against smoke, the trouble that leaves us both in disorder
- If someone should ask in whose reign the seed of it was sown, how would the pine that has taken its root in the rock make an answer
- When the season comes round, it puts on the same hue and blooms as before— even the cherry of a house where one branch has withered off