羽衣の薄きに変はる今日よりは
空蝉の世ぞいとど悲しき
空蝉の世ぞいとど悲しき
- Roma-ji
-
Hagoromo no usuki ni kawaru kyō yori wa
utsusemi no yo zo itodo kanashiki - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- From this day, when I change into something thin as a feathered robe, this cast-off-cicada world grows sadder to me by far.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Maboroshi
Genji answered Hanachirusato's poem with this one. From today, in thin summer cloth, he says, how little the world holds comes home to him—meeting the care with which she had invited him to remember. All that year, at every seasonal observance, he was made to feel Murasaki no Ue's absence, and he set it down in verse. The exchange with Hanachirusato is one of the few untroubled ones in the whole of it.
"A feathered robe" is the thin garment of the celestial beings, standing for the lightness of summer cloth. "Change into something thin" takes up her "cut and changed." "The cast-off-cicada world" is a world as insubstantial as an empty shell, and the phrase is a standing epithet for the word world. Thinness and the cicada both belong with the feathered robe. From one detail of clothing the poem carries the language over to impermanence, keeping the etiquette of the exchange exactly.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- On this day at least, when the summer robes have been cut and changed anew, will the old remembering not come forward of itself
- 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
- For the most part this is a world I have thought my way out of, and still— should I go on plucking, and so sinning, at the heartvine