魂をつれなき袖に留めおきて
わが心から惑はるるかな
わが心から惑はるるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Tamashii o tsurenaki sode ni tomeokite
waga kokoro kara madowaruru kana - English Translation
-
Having left my soul
behind at your unfeeling
sleeve, I find that I
am lost, and it is my own
heart that has bewildered me
- Meaning
- Having left my soul behind at your unfeeling sleeve, I am lost—and it is my own heart that has led me astray.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Yugiri
Unused to such expeditions, Yugiri went back to his own house at Sanjo with his mind still at Ono. His wife, Kumoinokari, had already noticed that he was not himself. That same day he sent a letter to the Fallen Leaf Princess, and this poem was in it. She would not answer, and his feeling was left hanging in the air. The letters that followed were what brought his wife's jealousy to a head.
"Left my soul behind" is the old poetic figure of a soul that goes out of the body and stays with someone else, standing for deep attachment. "Your unfeeling sleeve" is the Princess. "My own heart" gives the cause. "Lost" is being confused and adrift. Nothing at all had happened, and he nonetheless sends the poem in the exact form of a morning-after letter—putting the shape of a thing in place before the thing itself, which is very like him.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Soaked through and through by the dew at the eaves of this field of reeds, I must go parting my way out through mists that stand eightfold deep
- Making a pretext of the dew on the grass blades you must part to go, do you mean even so to lay a wet robe upon me
- It is in the damming that the shallowness will show, like a mountain stream— if the name that flows downstream cannot be kept wrapped up now
- Taking the meadow where the maidenflower droops for what sort of place, did you come and borrow it as lodging for a single night