岸遠く漕ぎ離るらむ海人舟に
乗り遅れじと急がるるかな
乗り遅れじと急がるるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Kishi tōku kogihanaruramu amabune ni
noriokureji to isogaruru kana - English Translation
-
I find myself in
haste, lest I be left behind
by the fisher's boat
that must be rowing far out
now and away from the shore
- Meaning
- I find myself in haste, lest I be left behind by the fisher's boat that must by now be rowing far out from the shore.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Tenarai
Learning that Ukifune had taken vows, the Captain sent this to the house. He likens the woman leaving the world to a boat pulling away from the shore, and says he would follow her into religion himself. She answered, and her answer put the wish aside. His letters went on coming, and his persistence is drawn as a distant reflection of Kaoru's.
Amabune is a fisher's boat, with ama, fisher, carrying ama, a nun. The shore is the world, and to leave it is to take vows. Nori okureji is not to be left behind, that is, to wish to go the same way. He uses the standard scene of boat and shore for renunciation, while what shows through is that he would rather hold her back.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- Holding myself and all others to be no more, I have gone and cast away a second time the world I had cast away once
- The world that I had settled it with myself was over and done with— from that same world I have turned away, and turned away again
- My heart, it is true, has put off the shore of this bitter world—and yet I am the fisher's drifting wood, that knows not where it goes
- At the foot of hills where the withering wind has blown, there is not so much as the shade of a single tree to stand hidden behind