Kokinshu #35

(Topic unknown.)

    O flowering plum --
merely from visiting
    for so short a time,
I was so soaked in your scent
that now someone suspects me.

—20 October 2010

Original author unknown -- or so the Kokinshu claims, but this is also in the collected poems of Fujiwara no Kanesuke, a contemporary of the editors (who included four attributed poems of his). Anonymized and placed in this sequence, it reads as a literal plum's scent, with the speaker's lover incorrectly assuming it came from a third party, and the speaker is protesting his faithfulness. In Kanesuke's collection, the headnote points at the reading that the scent is from a brief visit to her residence (possibly her incense), his own household is correctly suspicious, and he is obliquely telling his lover he intends to continue their affair regardless. Context changes oh so much. (More discussion here.)

Going by the Kokinshu reading (since that's what I'm translating), the unmarked flowers can be taken as the direct object of "visit," an exclamation, or an address -- the last, I think, points up the irony and comes closer to what I think of as the Kokinshu manner.


ume no hana
tachiyoru bakari
arishi yori
hito no togamuru
ka ni zo shiminuru

---L.