Kokinshu #95

Written to the Crown Prince of Urin Temple when [the author] traveled to the northern hills to view flowers.

    And so for today,
let us go mingle with
    the springtime hills.
If it gets dark, won't there be
shelter under the flowers?

—6 June 2011

Original by Sosei. The Crown Prince is Tsuneyasu, took vows after the death of his father, Emperor Ninmyô, in 850 and retired to the Urin Temple (see #75) until his own death in 869. The hills are the ones just to north of Kyoto. "Mingle with" is probably an over-literal rendering of majiru, but I'm not coming up with better -- the connotation at the time was to enjoy oneself among. Some commentaries interpret the poem as an indirect request for shelter at the temple; if one follows them, it's probably better to understand the unstated subject as singular -- "I shall" instead of "let us." Compacted grammar makes the final couplet touchy to unpack, but this is the general sense. If rhetorical questions (in this case, marked as expecting a negative answer) were not such a hallmark of Sosei, I'd render the final clause as something like "it's not as if there isn't shelter beneath the flowers."


iza kyô wa
haru no yama-be ni
majirinamu
kurenaba nage no
hana no kage ka wa

---L.