Kokinshu #133

On the last day of the Third Month, as it was raining he picked wisteria flowers and sent them [to someone].

    Though thoroughly drenched
I was determined to pick them,
    for I was aware
that within this year there are
but a few days left of spring.

—10 August 2011

Original by Ariwara no Narihira. This also appears in Tales of Ise chapter 80, in a context that makes it a desperate plea instead of what seems here the sharing of an esthetic experience (one that, as #132, implies awareness that we're all as impermanent as the flowers). Some scholars speculate that Narihira may have been riffing on a couplet by Po Chü-i/Bai Juyi, who was just starting to come into vogue in Japan. My version does not bring out the inverted sentence order, nor the general lightness of his shifting through layers of conditionality. All too often with Narihira, even when I do manage to reflect his surface meaning, it feels more than most poets' work like an inadequate shadow of the original. Not all of Tsurayuki's comments in his Kokinshi preface seem just, but his claim that Narihira tries to encompass too much feeling in too few words feels spot-on.


nuretsutsu zo
shiite oritsuru
toshi no uchi ni
haru wa ikuka mo
araji to omoeba

---L.