せくからに浅さぞ見えむ山川の
流れての名をつつみ果てずは
流れての名をつつみ果てずは
- Roma-ji
-
Seku kara ni asasa zo miemu yamagawa no
nagarete no na o tsutsumihatezu wa - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- It is the damming that will show how shallow it is, like a mountain stream—if the name that flows on cannot be kept covered.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Yugiri
Getting no answer, Yugiri wrote to Ono again. Refuse as she may, he says, the talk has begun, and refusing will only make what is between them look slight. The letter never reached the Princess; her mother, the Ichijo lady, saw it from her sickbed. Wanting to know what he really intended, she took up the brush herself, ill as she was, and wrote back.
"Damming" is stopping water, and from there refusing a suit. "Shallowness" is both a stream's and a heart's. "Mountain stream" belongs with damming, shallowness, and flowing as associated words. "The name that flows downstream" is a reputation carried on into the future, with flowing again from the stream. Water runs through the whole while he argues that resisting only cheapens the bond—the same reasoning he has used from the first.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- Taking the meadow where the maidenflower droops for what sort of place, did you come and borrow it as lodging for a single night
- I did part my way through the thick grasses of the autumn field, and yet did I ever knot the grass into a pillow for sleep