荒れ果つる朽木のもとを宿りきと
思ひおきけるほどの悲しさ
思ひおきけるほどの悲しさ
- Roma-ji
-
Arehatsuru kuchiki no moto o yadoriki to
omoiokikeru hodo no kanashisa - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- That you should keep in mind, as a place where you once lodged, the foot of a rotted tree fallen to ruin—there is the sadness of it.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Yadorigi
Ben's reply to Kaoru's poem on the lodging tree. Likening herself to a rotted tree, she says that his very fondness for a place in such a state is what saddens her. The Eighth Prince and Oigimi were gone, Naka no Kimi had moved to the capital, and this old nun was left alone at Uji. In the course of that night's talk she told Kaoru of Ukifune, and so he learned that a girl in the elder sister's likeness existed.
Kuchiki is a rotted tree, said both of her own age and of the ruined house. Taking over his yadorigi she carries on the word tree and lays herself over it. Omoi okikeru is to have kept a thing in mind, and oku also belongs with dew and frost as a word. That she says not that she is grateful but flatly that she is sad carries the real feeling of a long-serving woman who has lost one master after another.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- The under-cord that was tied in a bond not mine— am I to hold it against you with a single, undivided resentment
- 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
- You are thinking, it seems, without putting it forth in ears—the slender plume grass, whose beckoning sleeves are thick with the fallen dew
- That the fields have come to the end of autumn, too, is known by nothing but the faint stirring of wind through the slender plume grasses