世の常の色とも見えず雲居まで
たち昇りたる藤波の花
たち昇りたる藤波の花
- Roma-ji
-
Yo no tsune no iro to mo miezu kumoi made
tachinoboritaru fujinami no hana - English Translation
-
It does not look like
a colour of the common
world—this wisteria,
whose flowering waves have risen
as far as the reach of cloud
- Meaning
- It does not look like a colour of the common world: this wisteria, whose flowering waves have risen as high as the clouds.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Yadorigi
The Kobai Grand Counsellor closes the poems of the wisteria banquet with this. He is the man also called the Azechi Grand Counsellor, who in the Kobai chapter had sounded Niou out about a match with his daughter. He praises the wisteria clusters rising high and blesses the splendour of the occasion. The four poems end here, and from this point the eye of the tale leaves the brightness of the capital and turns back toward Uji.
"It does not look like a colour of the common world" answers, at the chapter's close, the ordinary hedge of Kaoru's poem at its opening. Kumoi is the sky where the clouds are, and hints as well at the palace. Fujinami makes waves of the wisteria clusters swaying in the wind. Some readers hear in tachinoboru an echo of the close of the Taketori monogatari, where the smoke of Fuji is said to rise still into the clouds.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- It is a flower that will bloom and be fragrant through ten thousand years, and so today too I look on a hue none can tire of
- The spray I broke off for my sovereign's headdress is a show of flowers yielding nothing whatever to the clouds of deep purple
- Wondering whether the face-bird's voice runs close to the one I once heard, I have parted the thickets and come seeking it today
- If she is a stand- in for the one I once knew, I will keep her close and make of her the figure I rub my longing into