Kokinshu #53
Thursday, 20 January 2011 07:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer Written on seeing cherry blossoms at Nagisa Palace.
In this world of ours,
if there were no such thing
as cherry blossoms,
then maybe the springtime heart
might at last be untroubled.
yo no naka ni
taete sakura no
nakariseba
haru no kokoro wa
nodokekaramashi
---L.
In this world of ours,
if there were no such thing
as cherry blossoms,
then maybe the springtime heart
might at last be untroubled.
—8 November 2009, rewrite 9 November 2010
Original by Ariwara no Narihira (825-880), younger brother of Yukihira and a grandson of emperors Heizei and Kanmu. One of the Six Poetic Geniuses, he has 30 poems in the Kokinshu. Some of his amorous adventures were thinly fictionalized as parts of Tales of Ise, which includes this poem in chapter 82 with the extended context of being composed during a hunting party with his patron, Prince Koretaka, who owned the palace at Nagisa near modern Osaka. As such, it's Narihira playing the courtier, which he did well but does not show him at his best. Haru no kokoro can be read as either "my/one's heart in spring" or "the heart of spring," an ambiguity I tried to maintain. The final -mashi is the most speculative of the conjectural verbal inflections in classical Japanese, sometimes used to express hopeless desire. I previously posted an earlier revision that got a few things wrong.yo no naka ni
taete sakura no
nakariseba
haru no kokoro wa
nodokekaramashi
---L.