Kokinshu Book Ib: Spring 1 (49-68)

[larryhammer]

Continued from previous scroll:

49. Ki no Tsurayuki Written on seeing flowers bloom for the first time on a cherry planted at someone's house.
kotoshi yori haru shirisomuru sakurabana chiru to iu koto wa narawazaranamu	So starting this year you've come to understand spring --     O cherry blossoms, would that you never be taught the meaning of scattering.
And with the plum flowers reduced to memories, we move on to cherry blossom season, which will last for even more poems -- a body of work that actually created the esthetic of the native sakura as the premier spring flower, displacing the plum imported from China. Sakurabana ("cherry-flower") also exactly fills a 5-syllable line and so rarely has a case-marker in poetry. Here it is almost certainly a direct address.
50. Author unknown Topic unknown.
yama takami hito mo susamenu sakurabana itaku na wabi so ware mihayasamu mata wa: sato tômi hito mo susamenu yamazakura	O cherry blossoms with none to admire you     high in the mountains, don't grieve so terribly -- I myself shall praise you. Otherwise:     O mountain cherry with none to admire you     in remote places,
In the alternate version, "places" is kind of awkward, but I'm failing to find any better; "valleys" has the right sound, but sets up a contrast with "mountains" not in the original, for all that other poems (such as #59) support the location. The alternate yamazakura ("mountain-cherry") also exactly fills a 5-syllable line, so also not often case-marked.
51. (Author unknown) (Topic unknown.)
yamazakura wa ga mini-kureba harugasumi mine ni mo wo ni mo tachi-kakushitsutsu	O mountain cherries, whenever I come see you,     the haze of springtime on the slopes and on the peaks rises up and conceals you.
Kureba can mean both "when (I) come" and "because (I) come," and even when understood as the former, the latter connotation remains. The idea that the universe is out to get us personally, it is old.
52. Fujiwara no Yoshifusa Written on seeing cherry blossoms arranged in a vase in front of the Somedono Consort.
toshi fureba yowai wa oinu shika wa aredo hana o shi mireba mono omoi mo nashi	As the years pass by my age only gets older --     and yet despite this, when I see these flowers here I have not one troubled thought.
Yoshifusa (804-872) was the first commoner, and first Fujiwara, to become regent (to his grandson, Emperor Seiwa). His daughter Akirakeiko (or Meishi), a wife of Emperor Montoku (ruled 850-858) and the mother of Seiwa, was called the Somedono Consort after Yoshifusa's villa near the capital. This is his only poem in the Kokinshu, and it's hard not to read it as a moment of triumphant smugness over having installed his daughter as empress. More literally, he doesn't have "thoughts about things," which in classical literature is usually understood as brooding upon personal affairs.
53. Ariwara no Narihira Written on seeing cherry blossoms at Nagisa Palace.
yo no naka ni taete sakura no nakariseba haru no kokoro wa nodokekaramashi	In this world of ours, if there were no such thing     as cherry blossoms, then maybe the springtime heart might at last be untroubled.
Narihira (825-880) was the younger brother of Yukihira and a grandson of emperors Heizei and Kanmu. One of the Six Poetic Geniuses, he has 30 poems in the Kokinshu. His amorous adventures were thinly fictionalized as parts of Tales of Ise, which includes this poem in chapter 82 with the extended context of being composed during a hunting party with his patron, Prince Koretaka (first appearing in #74), who owned a palace at Nagisa near modern Osaka. As such, it's Narihira playing the courtier, which he did well but does not show him at his best. Haru no kokoro can be read as either "my/one's heart in spring" or "the heart of spring," an ambiguity I tried to maintain. The final -mashi is the most speculative of the conjectural verbal inflections in classical Japanese, sometimes used to express hopeless desire.
54. Author unknown Topic unknown.
ishibashiru taki naku mogana sakurabana taorite mo komu minu hito no tame	If only there were no waterfall down these rocks!     -- then, cherry blossoms, I would come pluck your flowers for those who cannot see you.
Ishibashiru ("running [over] rock") is a stock epithet for waterfalls and other kinds of rushing water, which does add to the sense of the stream being a barrier. As such, this hearkens back to the mountain setting of #50-51.
55. Sosei Written on seeing mountain cherries.
mite nomi ya hito ni kataramu sakurabana te-goto ni orite iezuto ni semu	If we only gaze, how could we tell people about     these cherry blossoms? Let every hand gather some as souvenirs for home.
As you may have noticed from previous poems, Sosei liked rhetorical questions. Contrast with #54, where the blossoms are unobtainable.
56. (Sosei) Written on seeing the capital in full bloom.
miwataseba yanagi sakura o kokimazete miyako zo haru no nishiki narikeru	When I survey it, the willow and cherry trees     mingle together: the capital is indeed a brocade of springtime.
Remember the chronological jump ahead of #26? Here, we reach that part of the season. A preoccupation with willows comes from Chinese poetry, as does the imagery of a brocade of vegetation, though this particular combination is original. All in all, a lovely poem, in sound and conceit.
57. Ki no Tomonori Written on lamenting over growing older beneath the cherry blossoms.
iro mo ka mo onaji mukashi ni sakuramedo toshi furu hito zo aratamarikeru	These cherries must bloom with the same scent and color     as in days gone by, and indeed what changes is people who age with the years.
Pivot-word: the first part of sakuramedo ("seem to bloom, but") is sakura, the cherry that's blooming. Compare the flowers' permanence here to their swift departure in prior poems (especially #53).
58. Ki no Tsurayuki Written on a broken cherry [branch].
tare shi ka mo tomete oritsuru harugasumi tachi-kakusuramu yama no sakura o	Who -- who in the world sought out and broke it off?     Spring mists, didn't you rise up and conceal them, these cherries of the mountains?
The cherries are back to being transient, though by a different cause. The idiomatic first line is trying to reproduce the effect of marking "who" with three emphatic particles. Grammatical bits: the spring mist, again unmarked, can be read as addressee or subject of "rise-and-conceal," while the last two lines invert the normal sentence order, syntactically reflecting Tsurayuki's supposed outrage.
59. (Ki no Tsurayuki) Composed when the emperor commanded a poem be presented.
sakurabana sakinikerashi na ashibiki no yama no kai yori miyuru shirakumo	The cherry blossoms seem to have flowered at last:     white clouds seen in the steep-sloped gorges of the foot-weary mountains.
When Tsurayuki uses a stock epithet, he often makes it pull more weight than the merely decorative, and here ashibiki no (original meaning uncertain but generally understood as something like "foot-dragging" or "foot-weary") modifying the mountains does indeed add a general sense of "rugged" to the gorges, which are unmodified in the original. Textual issue: most editions of this text (but not the one I'm using) emend na to mo on the assumption the former is a mistake by Teika, and indeed doing so does make it easier to read; however, changing which exclamatory particle is used doesn't affect my translation. In classical Japanese verbs of existence and copulas tended to be dropped, leaving just a noun phrase, even more than in modern usage, so this would probably have been understood as "(there are) white clouds" -- but since we understand that in English as well, I left it literal. Besides, I like the emphasis of the short line.
60. Ki no Tomonori A poem from the poetry contest held the palace of the consort in the Kanpyô era.
miyoshino no yamabe ni sakeru sakurabana yuki ka to nomi zo ayamatarikeru	O cherry blossoms blooming around the mountains     of fair Yoshino -- I really did mistake you for nothing more than the snow!
At the time, the Yoshino area was better known for its deep snow than the cherry blossoms of later reputation. This may not be the most original poem ever, but as a statement of the idea it is lovely in precisely those ways that do not translate well. This tends to happen with Tomonori.
61. Ise Written in a year with an intercalary Third Month.
sakurabana haru kuwawareru toshi dani mo hito no kokoro ni akare ya wa senu	O cherry blossoms, in these years with extra spring,     at the very least, couldn't you then attempt to satisfy the human heart?
To keep the lunar calendar in synch with the solar year, leap months were added as needed; that it was an extra Third Month tells us that this was written in 904. Needless to say, flowers don't actually last longer when spring is four months long, making this another specimen of the wit of #1, though handled here with more grace.
62. Author unknown Written when someone, after long absence, visited while the cherry blossoms bloomed.
ada nari to na ni koso tatere sakurabana toshi ni marenaru hito mo machikeri	These cherry blossoms that have a reputation     for being fickle wait even for those who rarely visit the rest of the year.
This (along with the next poem) appears in chapter 17 of Tales of Ise, where the author is an anonymous woman. The flowers are, of course, a metaphor for the speaker. The cherry blossoms could be address or unmarked subject, but as part of an exchange, the former reads just a little too archly.
63. Ariwara no Narihira Reply.
kyô kozu wa asu wa yuki to zo furinamashi kiezu wa ari to mo hana to mimashi ya	If I had not come today, they would have fallen     tomorrow like snow -- and even if they don't melt, would they then still seem flowers?
In Tales of Ise, the author is an anonymous man, though the manner of sifting through suppositions is so distinctive it could hardly be anyone but Narihira. Note that while furu means "to fall" for snow, its homonym means "to get old" for a person, and a flower was a common metaphor for feminine beauty. So continuing the metaphor of flowers=the woman from #62, the final question then asks whether, even if she waits for him, will he still see her as a woman -- that is, as a lover. Not the most gentle way of cutting someone off. Or maybe he's asking her whether it's worth resuming their relationship. Or if he'll still be in love when she's old. Or ...
64. Author unknown Topic unknown.
chirinureba kouredo shirushi naki mono o kyô koso sakura oraba oriteme	For all my longings, they still leave nothing behind     once they have scattered -- if I am to pluck blossoms, it's today I must pluck them.
Literally, it's just sakura to be plucked, but in English "cherry" means the fruit not the flower.
65. (Author unknown) (Topic unknown.)
ori-toraba oshige ni mo aru ka sakurabana iza yado karite chiru mada wa mimu	We would regret it, breaking and carrying off     these cherry blossoms! Let us hire nearby lodgings and watch them till they scatter.
Although this can be read as an answer to the previous, there's no indication (unlike #62-63) they were originally connected.
66. Ki no Aritomo (Topic unknown.)
sakura-iro ni koromo wa fukaku somete kimu hana no chirnamu nochi no katami ni	I shall dye my robes deeply with the color of     the cherry blossoms, to wear as a memento after the flowers scatter.
Aritomo (c.820?-880) was the father of Tomonori (who mourns him in #854). He has two poems in the Kokinshu. I couldn't reproduce the inverted sentence order (the last two lines would normally go in the middle of the third line) without sounding really awkward, and while the original isn't great poetry, awkward it is not. Note the light irony of deeply dying something a pale pink, and that back during white plum-flower season, the robes were instead permeated with the scent.
67. Ôshikôchi no Mitsune Written and sent to someone who had come to view the blooming of the cherry blossoms.
waga yado no hanami-gatera ni kuru hito wa chirinamu nochi zo koishikarubeki	As for the people who come visit my house     for flower viewing, after they have all scattered they indeed must be longed for.
Reading hito in the poem as "people" instead of what's clearly a singular person in the headnote let me almost reproduce the ambiguity of what's longed for (and by whom). The subtext is, of course, the sentiment of #62, only with more sarcasm than archness.
68. Ise Written during the poetry contest in the Teiji Palace.
miru hito mo naki yamazato no sakurabana hoka no chirinamu nochi zo sakamashi	O cherry blossoms of the mountain village where     no one can see you, would that you keep blooming after others have scattered.
Teiji belonged to retired emperor Uda, who hosted this contest in 913. Which presents us with a chronology problem, as the two Kokinshu prefaces assert that the anthology was either commissioned or completed in 905 (they disagree on which), and circumstantial evidence otherwise suggests that the work took at most a year or two. Do we conclude that "commissioned" is right and work actually took rather longer than expected, or that the transmitted Kokinshu texts represent a silently revised version that shows no seams in the finely balanced progression? (Such revisions would include three poems from the Teiji contest, plus a couple others dated somewhat after 905.) Either way, scholars continue to debate this. As for the poem itself, contrast the sentiment with several previous poems, especially #50.

As for book 2, it continues to obsess about cherry blossoms. Scattering, whirling, vanishing cherry blossoms of DOOM. (Or at least of elegant transience.)

(Index for this series)

---L.

Comments

[incandescens]

These were fascinating to read, and also very pleasant. Thank you!

[larryhammer]

You're welcome. Thanks for the kind words.

---L.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I like the final comment. ;-)

[larryhammer]

If nothing else, this will give me a kind of immunity to cherry blossom petals fluttering down at 5 cm/s.

What kind, I don't know yet ...

---L.