おほかたは思ひ捨ててし世なれども
葵はなほや摘みをかすべき
葵はなほや摘みをかすべき
- Roma-ji
-
Ōkata wa omoisuteteshi yo naredomo
aoi wa nao ya tsumiokasubeki - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- For the most part I have thought my way out of this world; and still, should I go on plucking at the heartvine and sinning by it?
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Maboroshi
Genji answered Chujo no Kimi's poem with this one. He has thought his way out of most things, he says, and the heartvine he would still like to pluck—a light jest at the woman in front of him. That a man set on taking vows could still speak so shows how unsettled he was. In the Fifth Month Yugiri came, and the two of them listened to a cuckoo and remembered Murasaki no Ue together.
"For the most part" concedes the greater part. "A world I have thought my way out of" is his intention to renounce it. "Heartvine" is the festival plant, and since the old poems its name has sounded the phrase for a day of meeting; here it means Chujo no Kimi. "Plucking, and so sinning" puns the verb for picking against the verb for transgressing. Plucking, sinning, and the plant itself all belong to the vocabulary of the rite, so even a jesting poem is fully worked.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- Did you come to me through the sudden rain of this evening, when I sit remembering one who is gone— cuckoo down from the mountain
- Cuckoo, carry word to her for me: that here at home the orange trees are at the very height of their flowering even now