いかでかく巣立ちけるぞと思ふにも
憂き水鳥の契りをぞ知る
憂き水鳥の契りをぞ知る
- Roma-ji
-
Ikade kaku sudachikeru zo to omou ni mo
uki mizutori no chigiri o zo shiru - English Translation
-
How did we contrive
to fledge and to grow like this—
thinking even so,
I come to know the bitter
bond that is the waterbird's
- Meaning
- Wondering how we ever came to grow up at all, I recognize the bitter bond that is the waterbird's.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Hashihime
Oigimi answered her father's poem on the waterfowl with this one. She had lost her mother early and had grown up unseen in the mountain village, and she turns his grief toward her own upbringing. Naka no Kimi followed with a poem of her own, so that the three make a single exchange and the life of the family at Uji is set before the reader.
To fledge belongs to the world of birds and takes up the waterbird her father had used. Uki, bitter, also sounds as uki, floating, so that the bird riding on the water and the hardness of her life lie over each other. Chigiri is the bond fixed in a former life. Where the father laments the wife he lost, the daughter answers with the precariousness of the life she and her sister have led, and the situation of the Uji sisters is stated here for the first time.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- Time has flowed away and the hope you gave me then came to nothing there by Takekawa I learned that the world is a hard thing
- Cast off and left when the one I was paired with went— like the waterbird, have I lingered on behind in this world that is but lent
- Weeping as you did, had you not spread out your wings over us, my lord, I would have stayed in the nest, an egg that never was hatched
- The one I once knew and the house are turned to smoke, and yet, for what cause, has this body of mine stayed unconsumed and lingered on