夏衣裁ち替へてける今日ばかり
古き思ひもすすみやはせぬ
古き思ひもすすみやはせぬ
- Roma-ji
-
Natsugoromo tachikaetekeru kyō bakari
furuki omoi mo susumi ya wa senu - English Translation
-
On this day at least,
when the summer robes have been
cut and changed anew,
will the old remembering
not come forward of itself
- Meaning
- On this day at least, when the summer robes have been cut and changed, will the old remembering not come forward of itself?
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Maboroshi
In the Fourth Month came the change of clothes. Hanachirusato sent Genji his summer robes and added this poem. She had lived for years in the summer wing at Rokujo as one of his wives, with no share in the house's brilliance and no change in her steadiness, and she and Murasaki no Ue had passed all those years without a quarrel. She mourns her quietly. Genji answered, using the thinness of the cloth to speak of how little the world holds. His year is marked out by exchanges like this one, at the turns of the seasons.
"Summer robes" are the thin clothes of the season. "Cut and changed" is recutting cloth for new garments, and the verb belongs with the robe. "On this day at least" is asking for that much. "The old remembering" is thinking of the dead. The closing is a question. She uses an annual custom as her opening for memory, and there is nothing insistent about it—very like her.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- Weeping, I have come back again after all—this borrowed world of ours is nowhere, in the end, a land that goes on without change
- Since the paddy water where the geese used to gather ran dry, I have not so much as seen the shadow of the flower it once held
- From this day, when I change into something thin as a feathered robe, this world of the cast-off cicada grows sadder to me by far
- It is only right that water-weed should gather in the god's still water— but today's own ornament, and you forget its very name