つれづれと身を知る雨の小止まねば
袖さへいとどみかさまさりて
袖さへいとどみかさまさりて
- Roma-ji
-
Tsurezure to mi o shiru ame no oyamaneba
sode sae itodo mikasa masarite - English Translation
-
Idly, without cease,
the rain that tells me my worth
keeps falling, so that
even in my sleeves the flood
rises higher than before
- Meaning
- Idly and without cease the rain that tells me my own worth keeps falling, so that even in my sleeves the water has risen higher than before.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Ukifune
Ukifune's reply to Kaoru. Taking up the mizu masaru of his poem, she says that not only the river but the tears in her sleeves have risen. It has the form of a complaint that he comes so seldom, while what in fact speaks in it is the misery of a woman who can attach herself to neither man. Kaoru, without weighing it, went on to fix the Fourth Month as the time for bringing her to the capital.
"The rain that tells me my worth" leans on the Ise monogatari poem about a rain that makes one know one's own standing in another's heart. Mikasa is the depth of water, with some reading in mikasa, a rain hat, so that it belongs with the rain. Tsurezure to is idly, in low and empty spirits. She leans on an old poem and puts her own plain feeling inside it.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
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- When I take the name of this place to be my own, then the neighbourhood of Uji in Yamashiro grows harder still to live in
- I would make myself over into those rain clouds on the peak, that dark the sky and never clear, and float there, and so pass my life
- Not knowing that this was the season when the waves go over, I thought only that the pine of Sue was waiting there for me still
- Wondering where I might throw this body away, I go weeping through hills that not even the white clouds have come to rest upon