Kakaru ka no aki mo kawarazu nioi seba haru koishi chō nagame semashi ya

English Translation

If a scent like this
would keep its fragrance and not
change when autumn came
would I sit gazing out and
saying that I long for spring

Meaning

If a scent like this kept its fragrance unchanged into autumn, would I sit gazing out and saying that I long for spring?

Commentary

142 While I Wait Out This Life

The eldest daughter of the late Lady of the Bedchamber was a woman of unusual feeling, and composed better than her brothers and sisters. Her mother died when she was young and she was brought up by a stepmother, so that things did not go as she would have wished, and she composed "Arihatenu inochi matsu ma no hodo bakari uki koto shigeku nagekazu mogana". Breaking off a spray of plum, she also composed "Kakaru ka no aki mo kawarazu nioi seba haru koishi chō nagame semashi ya". She was so accomplished and so interesting a woman that many men courted her, but she would not even answer them. When her father and stepmother pressed her, saying that a woman does not end her life alone and that she might at least reply now and then, she said only "Omoedomo kai nakarubemi shinoureba tsurenaki tomo ya hito no miruramu" and fell silent. Her parents wished to see her married, but she said always that she would never take a husband, and died unmarried at twenty-nine. That is the whole of the section.
Of the Lady of the Bedchamber the prose gives nothing beyond the title; the poet is her eldest daughter, brought up by a stepmother. Some hold that she, like the Yoshiie of the preceding section, is an invented figure.
The setting is her breaking off a spray of plum; the plum flowers in early spring.
What prompted the poem was the flower in her hand.
The section goes on to a poem about her treatment of her suitors.

The scent is the plum in her hand; the plum was celebrated in poetry for its fragrance.
What follows is a condition contrary to fact: if it kept its scent into autumn.
The phrase in the fourth line is the contracted form of the words meaning so called: what people call longing for spring.
The verb that closes means to gaze out while sunk in thought, and the question is rhetorical: would she do so? She would not. If the plum's scent outlasted its season there would be no need to long for spring. A grief at what passes is stated through a supposition about a scent lasting, and the temper of a woman who writes always of what cannot be had shows in it.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

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