Kokinshu #95

[lnhammer]

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.

Comments

[movingfinger]

"Linger among" perhaps, not literal but carrying the sense of pleasurable dawdling.

[lnhammer]

That has possibilities. Hmm.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

I interpret the "nage no" as "poor, flimsy, unreliable" rather than "nonexistent." Like, "If it gets dark, will the shade of the flowers be poor [shelter]? [No, it will be great]". A fiddly point and maybe one you are glossing over on purpose for the meter's sake. To impose that restriction on myself: "If it gets dark, how bad can/ shelter under flowers be?" maybe or "Would flower-shade be such poor/ shelter, should night's darkness fall?" to take a few more liberties.

[lnhammer]

Hmm. The commentary I was leaning on glosses it as 無くなりそうな（無げの）, which sense my kogojiten confirmed. Admittedly as the second sense, with なさそうだ coming first. And the commentary also admits the sense of the phrase is a bit hard to grasp. Not to mention, hmmm.

As for other readings *flip flip flip* ... Lessee -- McCullough reads is as non-existent and Rodd obscures the issue by her wording but seems to agree, while a third I found might agree with you, but it's hard to tell through the paraphrasing: "If darkness overtakes us, / how about the shelter / of the delicate, falling blossoms ... ?" Lange gives us "Dunkelt es, find' ich wohl Schutz unter dem bluhenden Baum" -- not entirely helpful (and where's his kage anyway?).

So yet again, hmm.

---L.

[starlady]

My knows-enough-to-get-into-trouble, not-enough-to-get-herself-back-out 2¢ is that I've been told that the answer to rhetorical questions in bungo is always "no," which would support Anon's reading.

[lnhammer]

Hee. I can think of one famous counter-example by Ise, but generally yeah, the answer is (when a Y/N question) expected to be No, even if it isn't explicitly marked as such. But how does that support that reading? -- either would fit that, it seems to me.

---L.

[lnhammer]

Counter-example rhetorical question that expects a Yes answer: KKS 2:112 (marked with ka wa.

---L.