Kokinshu #335

[lnhammer]

Written on snow falling on plum flowers.

    Though your flowers' hue
is mingled with the snowfall
    and cannot be seen,
give us your glorious scent --
people should know where they are.

—5 November 2012

Original by Ono no Takamura (802–852), a candidate for being Komachi's grandfather or adoptive father, or possibly both. A leading Chinese poet and scholar of his generation, he was a deputy for a 834 embassy to Tang China but after its first ship was wrecked he refused board a second, for which he was exiled to Oki Island off the north coast of Honshu (see #407) and pardoned a few years later. He has six poems in the Kokinshu. ¶ A well-crafted, if not brilliant, poem -- and a good example of how Chinese manners were repurposed as part of nativizing them into Japanese: plum scent is almost never mentioned in Chinese poetry. Compare #39, which was written later and possibly is alluding to this, and the structurally similar #91, which could have been written around the same time.


hana no iro wa
yuki ni majirite
miezu to mo
ka o dani nioe
hito no shirubeku

---L.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Any particular reason why your version addresses the tree rather than the flowers? I've always thought of this sort of poem as talking directly to the blossoms themselves. The different perspective is interesting. --Matt

[lnhammer]

Mainly because hana no iro wa seems to mark the flowers as a third party, or at least at a distance from the entity addressed. (Here is me, and there are the flowers and their color, and over here is you.) But I did hesitate over this, given that the tree can't directly give us the scent, only the flowers.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

Makes sense. I wonder if it would be acceptable to treat this as a sort of subjunctive order, like "May they smell [pleasantly]! So that people will know [they're there]". It seems possible but I can't think of any other examples offhand.

[lnhammer]

*nod* I think that would also work.

---L.