心こそ憂き世の岸を離るれど
行方も知らぬ海人の浮木を
行方も知らぬ海人の浮木を
- Roma-ji
-
Kokoro koso ukiyo no kishi o hanaruredo
yukue mo shiranu ama no ukigi o - English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- My heart has indeed put off the shore of this bitter world; yet I am drifting wood upon the water, that does not know where it goes.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Tenarai
Ukifune's reply to the Captain's poem of the fisher's boat. Her heart has left the world, she says, but her person is like a piece of driftwood with no course of its own, and so she lets his offer to follow her pass. Even as a nun she still holds herself to be a thing without anchorage, and that sense of herself runs back to the name Ukifune itself.
"The shore of the bitter world" takes over the shore of his poem. Ama no ukigi is wood adrift on the sea, with ama, fisher, carrying ama, nun: one who drifts still, though she has taken vows. Since the drifting boat of the Ukifune chapter she has kept likening herself to what floats on water, and this poem belongs to that line. Setting heart against body states exactly where she now stands.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Thinking there can be no one waiting for me here, I look at the tops of the trees of this hill village, and still find it hard to pass