かきくらす野山の雪を眺めても
降りにしことぞ今日も悲しき
降りにしことぞ今日も悲しき
- Roma-ji
-
Kakikurasu noyama no yuki o nagamete mo
furinishi koto zo kyō mo kanashiki - English Translation
-
Though I look out at
the snow that darkens the fields
and hills, what has passed
and fallen away from me
is sorrowful again today
- Meaning
- Though I look out at the snow that darkens the fields and hills, what has fallen away into the past is sorrowful again today.
- Commentary
-
Part Three: Tenarai
With the new year, in Kaoru's twenty-eighth, the house at Ono lay buried in snow and no one came. Ukifune, now a nun, passed quiet days with Shosho and the others. This is the first of four poems exchanged with the elder nun on a day of snowfall. The days at Uji, and the night she threw herself into the river, have all gone far off under the snow.
Kakikurasu is to darken the sky, a word used in the Ukifune chapter as well. Furinishi carries both furu, to fall as snow, and furu, to grow old and pass by, so that fallen snow and a vanished past lie together. Looking at snow is itself an act of remembering, and season and mind are joined in the one word. The poem says quietly that taking vows has not made the past go away.
- Author
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Source
- Genji Monogatari
- Other
-
- 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
- It is the world at large that you have turned from, and yet, taking the words of your renouncing to me, it is my own lot that hurts
- Gathering and prizing the young herbs from between the snows of this hill place, I find I still put my trust in the growing years ahead
- From this time onward I shall gather them for you, year after year: these young herbs of the fields, where the snow is lying deep upon them