花の色を見ても知りなむはつ霜の
心わきてはおかじとぞ思ふ
心わきてはおかじとぞ思ふ
- Roma-ji
-
Hana no iro o mite mo shirinamu hatsushimo no kokoro wakite wa okaji to zo omou
- English Translation
-
You will know it well
when you look on the colour
of the flowers: no
first frost, I think, sets itself
with any partial intent
- Meaning
- You will know it when you look at the colour of the flowers: the first frost, I think, does not settle with any partiality in it.
- Commentary
-
51 The Same Branch
From the High Priestess of Kamo to the emperor came "Onaji e o wakite shimo oku aki nareba hikari mo tsuraku omooyuru kana", and the emperor's reply was "Hana no iro o mite mo shirinamu hatsushimo no kokoro wakite wa okaji to zo omou". That is the whole of the section.
The High Priestess of Kamo was an unmarried imperial princess serving at that shrine. In the forty-ninth section the emperor's own daughter holds that office and exchanges poems with him over chrysanthemums. The emperor here is the same one.
The setting is the emperor's residence, at the moment her poem arrived.
What prompted it is her poem, "Onaji e o wakite shimo oku aki nareba hikari mo tsuraku omooyuru kana", with its complaint of partiality.
This reply closes the fifty-first section. The prose passes no judgement; the section consists of the exchange alone.
The opening says she will know it when she sees the colour of the flowers. Where she spoke of how the frost falls, he points forward to the season when the blossom comes.
What follows denies that the first frost settles with any partiality, in the grammar of what will not be so.
He takes up her own words for dividing and for settling and turns them into a denial. Answering a poem by reusing its words as an argument is the construction of the exchanges in the sixteenth and twenty-first sections.
The closing, with an emphatic particle governing the verb, pushes the judgement forward: this is what I think. He denies the partiality outright, and puts the proof of it off until the spring.
- Source
- Yamato Monogatari
- Other
-
- Not cloud — the thing that sits on this peak among the high trees turns out to be myself, who have turned my back on a world of hardship
- An autumn that lays its frost on one branch and not another — and so even the light of the sun comes to seem hard to bear now
- A heart as deep as the sea I keep, and yet — off shore, out of your sight — it turns out to be a thing that gets itself resented
- The deer that pushes through the autumn fields — does it too, like me, cry out and raise its voice, held back by the thick growth that stands between