Kokinshu #167

When a request came from a neighbor for some of his blooming wild pinks, he was reluctant, and wrote and sent this poem.

    I thought for sure not
a speck of dust lay on them --
    this bed of pinks that,
since blooming, I have kept like
the one where my wife and I sleep.

—21 October 2011

Original by Ôshikôchi no Mitsune. In the headnote, it's ambiguous whether the poem is a substitute for or accompanies the flowers -- the former is the traditional interpretation. Tokonatsu, nowadays more commonly called nadeshiko, is the wild pink or wild carnation (Dianthus superbus). It usually blooms in and is a symbol of early autumn, but is appropriate here because when tokonatsu is written in kanji, the characters mean "endless summer," making it covertly in season, plus sequence-wise it signals that summer is ending. The first part of its name is a pivot-word on toko = "bed," which in turn associates with "sleep" and, less obviously, "dust" -- because a dusty bed is a sign of disuse and hence of a faithless husband. Put all that and an inverted sentence structure together, and you have Mitsune pretending that asking for some flowers implies he's been neglecting them, which by the bed pun is tantamount to accusing him of philandering oh noes. Or at least of bad householding. "I have kept like" is not in the original but my attempt at making syntactic sense of how to dovetail phrases around the pivot, of which "like" is more defensible part. Whether to also understand the "summer" of the flower's name as part of the poem, thus making it fit the season better, is open to debate -- I don't, because ALREADY COMPLICATED ENOUGH THANK YOU. Translation difficulties aside, I rather like the graceful lilt of the second half.


chiri o dani
sueji to zo omou
sakishi yori
imo to wa ga nuru
tokonatsu no hana

---L.