Kite miredo kokoro mo yukazu furusato no mukashi nagara no hana wa chiredomo

English Translation

I have come and looked
and my heart is not eased by
it — though in this old
place the flowers are falling
just as they always have done

Meaning

I have come and looked, and my heart is not eased — though in this old place the flowers are falling just as they always did.

Commentary

80 The Flowers as They Always Were

When the flowers were at their height at the Uda palace, the young men of the Nan'in house and others gathered there and held a poetry meeting. The Master of the Right Capital Office, Muneyuki, composed this poem. There were other poems too, the prose concludes.
The Master of the Right Capital Office is Minamoto no Muneyuki, a grandson of Emperor Kōkō and one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he appears in the thirtieth through thirty-second sections, and in the thirty-fourth, thirty-ninth and sixty-third, and in the fifty-fourth his third son composes a poem. The young men of the Nan'in house were the sons of that family, among whom he was one. The Uda palace was Emperor Uda's residence.
The setting is the Uda palace, at the height of the blossom, with a company gathered for a poetry meeting.
What prompted the poem was that occasion, the blossom having been set as the subject.
The section ends with the poem, the prose noting only that there were others. From its content it is taken to have been composed after Emperor Uda's death.

The opening says that he has come and looked and his heart is not eased; the phrase means to be satisfied or relieved, and it is negated. At a poetry meeting, before the blossom, he reports feeling nothing.
The word for the old place means somewhere long familiar; here it is the Uda palace, with the sense of a house where people once gathered.
The flowers are as they always were: blooming and scattering exactly as before.
The closing breaks off without a verb — they are falling, and then nothing. The flowers are unchanged; the place is not what it was; and the conclusion is left unsaid. Putting the unchanged thing first to show what is absent is the construction of the poem about the pond in the seventy-second section.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other