Kokinshu #78

[lnhammer]

Written, attached to a flower[ing branch], and sent to a close friend who had visited and returned home.

    Though today you tried
to wait for his coming,
    O cherry blossoms,
even you caught but a glimpse --
so if you must fall, fall now.

—20 February 2011

Original by Ki no Tsurayuki. Typically when Tsurayuki packs more than you expect possible into a poem, it's still easy to read -- this, however, is also grammatically involute and harder than usual to tease into coherence. At least the unmarked cherry blossoms are here explicitly addressed, with an actual second-person pronoun no less, so are not grammatically ambiguous. My version doesn't really capture the strength of the desiderative inflection on that final wish that the flowers scatter (but then, it didn't in the identical second line of #74). Social history notes: the headnote shows that the practice, mentioned in Genji and The Pillow Book, of attaching message-poems to thematically appropriate vegetation dates to at least a century before those were written.


hitome mishi
kimi mo ya kuru to
sakurabana
kyô wa machimite
chiraba chiranamu

---L.

Comments

I agree, this one is thorny

[(Anonymous)]

I agree, this one is thorny. I would interpret the last two lines as "Just wait until (the end of) today to see if he comes again, and then (if he doesn't) fall if fall you must." I can't point to any specific evidence in the text, but it feels more natural to me than putting the prelude to what happened all the way down in line 4, which gives you the poetic structure IMPORTANT THINGS IMPORTANT THINGS administrivia IMPORTANT THINGS. But I won't deny that weirder convolutions can be observed in other KKS poems.

I also want to interpret the "kimi" as referring to Tsurayuki's friend rather than the sakura, because that lets you read the first two lines more simply: "That person [you/we/etc] caught a glimpse of, will they come again? so thinking, o sakura, just wait.. (etc.)" (The key part is that the "ya" attaches to the "kuru" and then the whole thing gets quoted by the "to".) I'm less confident about this -- still not 100% on the rules of 2nd- and 3rd-person address in KKS times.

Hope this doesn't come off as kibitzing, btw, as I do agree that this one requires more than the usual amount of assumption-scaffolding to make sense of.

Re: I agree, this one is thorny

[lnhammer]

I tried to read the last two lines that way, but my understanding is that -te didn't develop the modern mild imperative sense until much later. And while the conjunctive use had developed by KKS times, I can't wrap my brain around how to stack that conjunction up with the conditional. Which leaves understanding it as a separate clause using the perfective -tsu, for all that it forces a more convoluted reading.

I'm less than 100% on the uses of kimi as well. Your suggestion does simplify it a little. Hmm ...

No worries about kibitzing -- I'm posting these in hopes of corrections to what I get wrong. Elsewise, how will I improve? Thanks for these notes -- much to cogitate here.

---L.

Re: I agree, this one is thorny

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, quite, I agree that it's not the modern sort-of-imperative ending "te" (my understanding about the timing of that evolution is the same as yours there). I guess I see it as something like (after a quick search) #899:

鏡山いざ立ちよりて見てゆかむ...

where it is used to sequence the parts of a proposal-for-the-future: let's stop, look, then go (on). Now that you mention it though it does seem a bit odd to go straight from that into a conditional.

Re: I agree, this one is thorny

[lnhammer]

Yeah, that one is clearly a sequence of events all encompassed under the final inflection. Maybe doing that with a conditional was also kosher, or at least comprehensible under the compression of a poem. But I still have trouble stringing it together that way.

---L.