君にとてあまたの春を摘みしかば
常を忘れぬ初蕨なり
常を忘れぬ初蕨なり
- Roma-ji
-
Kimi ni tote amata no haru o tsumishikaba
tsune o wasurenu hatsuwarabi nari - English Translation
-
Because it was for
you that I have picked them through
so many springs, these
are the season's first bracken,
unforgetful as ever
- Meaning
- Because it was for you that I picked them through so many springs, here again are the season's first bracken, as unfailing as ever.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Sawarabi
Spring came round again to the mountain village at Uji. Naka no Kimi had lost her sister Oigimi the previous autumn, and their father the Eighth Prince before that, and she was left alone in the villa. From the abbot of the Uji hills, who had been the prince's teacher in religion, came a basket of bracken and horsetail shoots, just as in other years, with this poem attached. Moved that the abbot still had her father in mind, Naka no Kimi wept, and had a gentlewoman write her answer for her.
Kimi is the late Eighth Prince. "So many springs" is the long stretch of years in which the gift never failed, and tsumi, to pick, carries tsumu, to pile up, so that the accumulated years sound in the word. "Unforgetful as ever" means keeping to the usual custom, and speaks for a mountain temple whose care does not change though the master is gone. The plainness of the poem is what carries its sincerity, and it opens the spring chapter of the Uji sequence well.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Even to look back and call up what has gone by is to find it frail; on what, then, should I rely for all the time still to come
- If you have decided that the time to come is short, then at the least, while I am here before your eyes, I would have you not turn away
- This spring, to whom now am I to show them—these young bracken of the peak, picked as a keepsake left by one who is no longer here
- Is it a flower that answers to the heart of the man who broke it— one that puts nothing in its colour, yet breathes scent below