人恋ふるわが身も末になりゆけど
残り多かる涙なりけり
残り多かる涙なりけり
- Roma-ji
-
Hito kouru waga mi mo sue ni nariyukedo
nokori ōkaru namida narikeri - English Translation
-
This body of mine
that longs for her draws toward
its own end, and yet
what remains in abundance
turns out to be only tears
- Meaning
- This body of mine that longs for her draws toward its end, and yet what remains in abundance turns out to be tears.
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Maboroshi
Genji answered Chujo no Kimi's poem with this one. His life is nearly out, he says, and his tears show no sign of running out—an admission that the anniversary has changed nothing. All that year he had held to his wish to take vows without acting on it, and from about this time he began in earnest to put his affairs in order. In the Twelfth Month he burned Murasaki no Ue's letters, and at the year's end he spoke the poem that closes his life.
"Longs for her" is thinking of the dead. "Draws toward its own end" is having little life left. "What remains in abundance" sets the shortness of one thing against the quantity of another. He takes up her tears and her ending and swaps which of them runs out, keeping the form of an exchange while saying plainly what his last years have come to.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The Weaver's meeting I watch as a thing beyond the clouds, apart from me, while in this garden of parting the dew settles more
- There is no bound at all to the tears of longing for her—and today, what is it that they are calling the end of, after all this
- The white dew on the chrysanthemums we used to sit up and set out together falls this autumn onto one sleeve, and alone
- You who pass across the great sky, conjurer—go and seek out for me the whereabouts of a soul that will not come even in dreams