いにしへの秋の夕べの恋しきに
今はと見えし明けぐれの夢
今はと見えし明けぐれの夢
- Roma-ji
-
Inishie no aki no yūbe no koishiki ni
ima wa to mieshi akegure no yume - English Translation
-
The autumn evening
of long ago is what I
long for, and what showed
itself as the end was a
dream in the dark before dawn
- Meaning
- It is the autumn evening of long ago that I long for; and what showed itself as the end was a dream in the dark before dawn.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Minori
When Murasaki no Ue died, Genji would not be moved from her side, and Yugiri had to take charge of the funeral entirely. Sunk in grief, Genji did not even draw the curtain when his son came near, and so Yugiri looked, for the first time, long at her face. In death she was more beautiful than she had been alive. He spoke this poem to himself then. He had glimpsed her once, years before, on the day of the great wind, and that memory lies under the poem.
"The autumn evening of long ago" is that day, when he saw her through a gap. "What I long for" is what draws him back. "Showed itself as the end" is seeing her at the last. "The dark before dawn" is the hour at which she died. Two kinds of light—an autumn dusk and the grey before morning—hold her living face and her dead one, and a single poem contains both meetings across all the years between.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- In a dewdrop world where at a breath they vie with one another to go, let no time at all pass between the one who stays and the one who goes
- In a world of dew that will not stay a moment in the autumn wind, who could see it as a thing of the grass blades alone
- Even the autumn of long ago feels to me like the present hour, and on sleeves already wet the dew comes settling again
- This wetness I can not tell as of then or now, and it is autumn nights themselves, taken all in all, that are hard to bear at all