月影は同じ雲居に見えながら
わが宿からの秋ぞ変はれる
わが宿からの秋ぞ変はれる
- Roma-ji
-
Tsukikage wa onaji kumoi ni mienagara
waga yado kara no aki zo kawareru - English Translation
-
The light of the moon
is to be seen in the same
sky as it always was,
and it is from my own house
that the autumn has altered
- Meaning
- The moonlight is there in the same sky as always; it is from my own house that autumn has altered.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Suzumushi
Genji answered the Reizei Emperor's poem with this one. The moon has not changed, he says; it is he who has—and with that he accepts the summons. He then took the princes and young nobles with him to the retired palace, where verse and music went on all night, and Reizei was greatly pleased that he had come. The chapter goes on from there to the Akikonomu Empress, who wishes to take vows out of concern for her mother's fate after death, and to Genji dissuading her.
"The light of the moon" is moonlight. "The same sky" takes up Reizei's "above the clouds." "From my own house" gives the cause, the particle marking where a thing proceeds from. "Autumn has altered" says that the season is no longer what it was, and some read the word for autumn as sounding, here too, the sense of having had enough. Setting an unchanged moon against a changed self is something Genji's poems of these years do again and again, and here his awareness of age is stated plainly.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Of your own accord you turned away and left this lodging in the grass, and still the bell cricket's voice has not grown old in the least
- Even to a house set far away and apart from above the clouds, it comes and does not forget— this moon of the autumn night
- In this evening mist that deepens the mountain village's own sadness, I find there is no sky at all for me to set out into
- The mist that rises and closes about the rough fence of a hill dweller will not hold back a man whose heart is elsewhere in the sky