深き夜の月をあはれと見ぬ人や
山の端近き宿に泊らぬ
山の端近き宿に泊らぬ
- Roma-ji
-
Fukaki yo no tsuki o aware to minu hito ya
yama no ha chikaki yado ni tomaranu - English Translation
-
Is it that you are
not one to look with feeling
at the late-night moon,
that you will not stay the night
in a house so near the ridge
- Meaning
- Are you not one to look with feeling at the late-night moon, that you will not stay in a house so near the mountain ridge?
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Tenarai
As the night wore on and the Captain made to leave, the nun held him back with this poem. It is in a house close under the ridge that the moon is best seen, she says, urging him to stay on the pretext of the view. She was set on bringing him and Ukifune together and made her chances this way, while Ukifune felt it only as a weight upon her.
"The late-night moon" is the moon well after dark, brought in as the test of a taste for such things. "A house near the ridge" stands where the moon's rising and setting can be watched close at hand. "Not one to look with feeling" is put as a half-rhetorical question, a light reproach for want of refinement. Hospitality and matchmaking are wrapped together in an elegant turn of phrase.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- I came here seeking the voice of the pine cricket, and once again I have lost my way among the dew of the bush-clover fields
- Do not lay the blame on a house overgrown with creeper, for a hunting robe that has come here parting the dew of the autumn fields
- I will watch the moon until it enters the ridge, to see whether there is any sign of it in the boards of the sleeping room
- Of things long ago that will not be forgotten, and at the hard joints of the flute-bamboo as well, I have wept aloud outright