横笛の調べはことに変はらぬを
むなしくなりし音こそ尽きせね
むなしくなりし音こそ尽きせね
- Roma-ji
-
Yokobue no shirabe wa koto ni kawaranu o
munashiku narishi ne koso tsukisene - English Translation
-
The flute's own measure
has not changed at all, and yet
the sound of weeping
for the one who came to nothing
is a sound that does not end
- Meaning
- The flute's measure has not changed at all; yet the weeping for the one who came to nothing is a sound that never ends.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Yokobue
Yugiri answered the Ichijo lady's poem with this one. Receiving Kashiwagi's flute as a keepsake, he says that the flute's tone is what it always was and only its owner is gone, and so speaks his unending feeling for his friend. The chapter takes its name from this poem. He carried the flute home, and that night Kashiwagi came to him in a dream and said something he had not expected about where the flute should go.
"Measure" is the tone and tuning of an instrument. "At all" also sounds the word for koto, carrying forward the pun that has run through the exchange. "Came to nothing" is died. "Sound" is the flute's note and at the same time the sound of weeping, so that an unchanged instrument and unending tears are set as a pair. Though it is the courtesy owed on receiving a keepsake, it holds the contrast between a thing and a person in a single poem, and it is the piece by which the chapter is known.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The feeling of the deep night I could make out, yes— but could I have played as though to put on my face what the strings might say for me
- Here at this weed-grown house where the dew lies heavy, the voices of the insects have not changed at all from the autumns of long ago
- If the wind that blows and gathers to the flute's own bamboo is the same, then let it be handed down to a root that runs long ages
- We had promised each other one same lotus seat, and yet how sad this day is, when the dew upon the leaf is parted in two