宿り木と思ひ出でずは木のもとの
旅寝もいかにさびしからまし
旅寝もいかにさびしからまし
- Roma-ji
-
Yadorigi to omoiidezu wa ko no moto no
tabine mo ika ni sabishikaramashi - English Translation
-
Had I not recalled
this as the tree I lodged in,
how lonely a thing
this travellers' sleep at the
foot of the tree would have been
- Meaning
- Had I not remembered this as the tree I once lodged in, how lonely this travellers' sleep at its foot would have been.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Yadorigi
Kaoru went to Uji, where arrangements were going forward to make the Eighth Prince's villa into a temple. Staying in the house as it began to fall into disrepair, and thinking of the prince and of Oigimi, he spoke this to the old nun Ben. She answered with a poem of her own grief. That night Ben told him of Ukifune, a daughter the Eighth Prince had fathered outside his household, and that disclosure sets the rest of the tale in motion.
Yadorigi is a plant that lodges on a tree, and carries the sense of the tree, or house, one lodges in; the chapter takes its name, Yadorigi, from this word. "Travellers' sleep at the foot of the tree" is the standard way of speaking of a poor night's lodging. The reasoning, that it is memory alone that saves the place from loneliness, states his feeling at staying in the ruined house, and the poem is among the better known of the Uji sequence.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- I had put my trust in a robe between us worn until it was known— and is it over so slight a thing that we come apart
- The under-cord that was tied in a bond not mine— am I to hold it against you with a single, undivided resentment
- That you should have kept in mind, as a place where you once lodged, the foot of a rotted tree fallen to ruin—there is the sadness
- You are thinking, it seems, without putting it forth in ears—the slender plume grass, whose beckoning sleeves are thick with the fallen dew