もの思ふと過ぐる月日も知らぬまに
年もわが世も今日や尽きぬる
年もわが世も今日や尽きぬる
- Roma-ji
-
Mono omou to suguru tsukihi mo shiranu ma ni
toshi mo waga yo mo kyō ya tsukinuru - English Translation
-
Lost in my own thoughts,
not knowing the months and days
as they went past me—
is it today that the year
and my own life come to an end
- Meaning
- Lost in my own thoughts, not knowing the months and days as they went past—is it today that the year, and my life with it, come to an end?
- Commentary
-
Part Two: Maboroshi
The year came to its end, and the demon-expelling rite was performed at Rokujo. Genji watched the small Prince Niou running about the house and thought that he would not see this child grow. The year since her death had gone by in a fog of thinking. He spoke this poem to himself, and it is the last he speaks in his life. After it he vanishes from the text, and the next chapter title, which has no text at all, stands for his death. The tale then leaps eight years and passes to Kaoru and Prince Niou.
"Lost in my own thoughts" is being sunk in them. "Not knowing the months and days as they went past" is losing track of time. "The year and my own life" uses one word for a life and an age. "Come to an end" asks whether today is the day. The last day of the year and the last day of a life are laid on one another—a quiet, large poem, and the right exit for the hero of a fifty-four-chapter tale.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- Not knowing whether I shall live until the spring, let me wear today in my hair this plum that has taken color in the snow
- Praying that you were a flower to see a thousand springs, I find my own body has grown old along with the snow as it came down
- How unsure it is and of whom am I to ask by what means to learn the beginning and the end of this body I know not
- There is a purpose in the wind that bears the scent of this garden plum how should the warbler not come to it before any else