目の前にこの世を背く君よりも
よそに別るる魂ぞ悲しき
よそに別るる魂ぞ悲しき
- Roma-ji
-
Me no mae ni kono yo o somuku kimi yori mo
yoso ni wakaruru tama zo kanashiki - English Translation
-
More than you, who turn
your back on the world before
my very eyes, it
is my soul, parting from you
at a distance, that grieves me
- Meaning
- Sadder than you, who renounce the world before my eyes, is my own soul, which parts from you at a distance.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Hashihime
At Uji the old gentlewoman Ben put into Kaoru's hands a bundle of old letters that bore on his birth. When he opened it, he found the letters exchanged by his father Kashiwagi and his mother, the Third Princess. This poem was written from Kashiwagi's sickbed when he heard that she had taken vows, with death close upon him. Meeting his father's hand so vividly, Kaoru has his answer.
To turn one's back on the world is to become a nun or a monk. The soul that parts at a distance is his own, leaving the body while he is kept away from her. He sets the parting of religion beside the parting of death, and says that the second is the harder. The past of the Kashiwagi chapter is opened again, more than twenty years later, in Kaoru's own hands, so that the story of his parents is built into the opening of the Uji chapters.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Having fathomed how the lady of the bridge feels, I pole the shallows, and with the drops from the pole my own sleeves have been soaked through
- Poling back and forth, the ferryman of Uji must have let the drops of morning and of evening rot his sleeves quite through at last
- Had I life enough, I might have looked and known him— the pine I have left among the rocks, unremarked, and how it grows on from here
- There is a voice that blows the spring haze open on the wind off the hills— yet what I see, set apart, are white waves in the distance