おほかたに聞かましものをひぐらしの
声恨めしき秋の暮かな
声恨めしき秋の暮かな
- Roma-ji
-
Ōkata ni kikamashi mono o higurashi no
koe urameshiki aki no kure kana - English Translation
-
I would have heard it
as one hears a common thing—
the cicada's voice,
which is hateful to me now,
at the closing of autumn
- Meaning
- I would have heard it as one hears an ordinary thing: the cicada's voice, which now sounds hateful to me at the close of autumn.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Yadorigi
With Niou's visits growing rare, Naka no Kimi passed uneasy days at the Nijo residence. At the close of autumn, listening to the evening cicadas, she spoke this to herself. From about this time her wish to go back to Uji grew strong, and she began to say so to Kaoru as well. He soothed her as her guardian and at the same time found his own feeling for her harder and harder to hold in.
Ohokata ni is as one takes an ordinary thing, meaning that at Uji she could have let the sound pass as one more noise of autumn. The higurashi is the cicada that cries at evening in autumn, an image that adds to loneliness. In aki no kure, aki carries aki, weariness, so that the lament of a woman grown tiresome is in it. The idea that the same sound is heard differently according to one's circumstances runs on directly from her earlier poem on the pines of the mountain village.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Even in the shade of the pines of a mountain village there was no autumn wind that went into me so deeply as this one
- The maiden flower is more drooping than before—how, I wonder, did the morning dew set itself down and leave this trace behind it
- Look where I will, the world gives us no leave—and yet the name of having grown used to the barrier river is a thing to grieve
- It may not look deep where the surface can be seen, and yet, in the bed of the barrier river, does the current ever fail