ぬきもあへずもろき涙の玉の緒に
長き契りをいかが結ばむ
長き契りをいかが結ばむ
- Roma-ji
-
Nuki mo aezu moroki namida no tama no o ni
nagaki chigiri o ikaga musubamu - English Translation
-
On the cord of tears
so fragile that they will not
stay strung upon it,
how should I ever tie down
a bond that is meant to last
- Meaning
- On a cord of tears too fragile to be strung at all, how should I ever tie down a bond that is meant to last?
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Agemaki
Oigimi's reply to Kaoru's poem on the knotted cords. Keeping to her father's charge, she means to avoid marriage, and she answers that her own life is too short for a long promise. Kaoru did not give up, and from here come the talks through the standing curtain and the visits by night that fill the chapter.
Nuku is to thread and string a thing, and tama no o is the cord on which beads are strung, a standing figure for a life. Tears that cannot be strung on it stand at once for her frail person and her short life. She takes up his musubu and answers within the same set of words belonging to cord and thread, so that learning and refusal are carried in a single turn of phrase.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Where would you suppose you were coming, that you might break the cherry off at this house of ours, closed in with the haze of mourning dye
- Into the knotted cords let a long bond be bound, and in the same place let the two strands twist and come, I would have it, together
- In the many voices by which one comes to know how a hill village feels, all of it is gathered up into this one growing light
- I had thought these hills a place where not even the voice of a bird comes, and yet the bitterness of the world has sought me out here