見し人も宿も煙になりにしを
何とてわが身消え残りけむ
何とてわが身消え残りけむ
- Roma-ji
-
Mishi hito mo yado mo keburi ni narinishi o
nani tote waga mi kienokorikemu - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- Both the one I knew and the house have turned to smoke; for what cause has this body of mine been left unconsumed?
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Hashihime
Fire destroyed the Prince's house in the capital, and he moved with his daughters to a villa at Uji. He had already sent his wife up in the smoke of the pyre, and now the house he had lived in had gone the same way. At Uji, where the sound of the river never stops, he spoke this poem. With that move the scene of the tale settles at Uji and the ten Uji chapters begin.
"The one I once knew" is his dead wife, and "the house" is the burned residence in the capital. The smoke of the pyre and the smoke of the fire are held in the single word kemuri, so that the two losses become one. To be left unconsumed is said of smoke or dew that does not vanish, and here of a man who alone survives. The removal to Uji reads both as a descent away from the capital and as a step toward death.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- My heart, in its wish to be quit of the world, goes to your hills—and yet is it you who set between clouds that rise in eightfold ranks
- No visitors come, though it is not that my heart has grown clear at all— I have found this Uji hill bitter, and borrowed a room