Tokinarazu furuyukikatozo nagamemashi hanatachibanano kaorazariseba

English Translation

Out of season snow
is what I would have called it,
gazing at it there—
had the orange blossoms here
not been sending out their scent

Meaning

I would have taken it for snow out of season, had the orange blossom not been giving off its scent.

Commentary

Section 11: The Garden of Our House, the Dream of the Rokkakudō Watercourse

In the days after she obtained the Tale of Genji and gave herself over to reading it, the author began setting down the seasons of her own garden in verse. In the early part of the fifth month, watching the orange blossom near the eaves fall in a drift of white, she composed a poem. Their house, like the foot of Mount Ashigara she had crossed on the way to the capital where the trees grew dark and thick, was a place overgrown with timber, so that the maples of the tenth month were finer there than on any of the surrounding hills, as though brocade had been drawn across the grounds. When a visitor from outside remarked that he had just passed a place on the road where the maples were very beautiful, she answered on the instant with another poem.
Thinking of tales all day long and holding them in mind through every waking hour of the night, she dreamed that someone came and told her that a watercourse was being made at the Rokkakudō for the Ippon no Miya, daughter of the Kōtaigōgū. When she asked what that might mean, the answer was that she should put her faith in Amaterasu Ōmikami. She told no one of the dream and let it pass without a thought, which was a poor thing indeed. And each spring, looking out toward that princess's residence, she composed a further poem.

The author is known only as the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. The Kōtaigōgū is Kenshi, third daughter of Fujiwara no Michinaga, who became empress to Emperor Sanjō and was styled Kōtaigōgū from the tenth month of Kannin 2 (1018) after his death. The Ippon no Miya was Sanjō's third daughter, born to Kenshi. The Rokkakudō is the Chōhōji in the capital, so called because its main hall is hexagonal.

Early in the fifth month, at the house in the capital, beneath the flowering orange near the eaves.

The poem came from the sight of the orange blossom near the eaves falling white and thick upon the ground.

It is a solitary poem, and no reply is recorded. Later in the same section the maples of the tenth month draw "Izukonimo otorajimonoo wagayadono yooakihatsuru keshikibakariwa" from her, and the house that had until then been described only as wild and overgrown takes its place in the diary as a garden with seasons of its own.

Toki narazu means "out of its season." In the second line zo is an emphatic particle bound to nagamemashi, in which mashi is the auxiliary of counterfactual supposition; it answers to seba in the closing line, forming the pattern seba … mashi: had it not been fragrant, she would have gazed on it as snow. The conditional clause is held back to the end, so that the poem first offers the astonishment of mistaking blossom for snow and only afterwards undoes the illusion. Likening fallen white blossom to snow is an old conceit, but here the point lies in the order of the senses: the eye alone cannot tell the difference, and it is scent that identifies the orange. Setting the noun hanatachibana in the fourth line and ending on an unfinished conditional leaves the poem hanging, and the resonance with it.

Author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

Source

Sarashina Nikki

Other