年を經てなどかあやなく空にしも
花のあたりを立ちは染めけむ
花のあたりを立ちは染めけむ
- Roma-ji
-
Toshi o hete nadoka ayanaku sora ni shimo hana no atari o tachi wa somekemu
- English Translation
-
After all these years,
why should you have stood there so
absently, beside
the flowers, and let yourself
be cut and dyed their color?
- Meaning
- After all these years, why should you have stood there so absently beside the flowers, and let yourself be cut and dyed their color?
- Commentary
-
75 The Exchange on the Red Plum in the Second Month
The year turned to the first of Tenen. Kaneie's visits were frequent at this time. In the second month, when the red plum was in beautiful flower and its scent hung about, Michitsuna broke off a spray and sent it to the woman with a poem. She answered it.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. Michitsuna was her son, nineteen that year. The woman is the one the text calls the Yamato-seeming person, and she is unnamed. The red plum is the deeper-colored variety, which blooms in the second month.
It is the second month of the first year of Tenen, and the place is the woman's house at the foot of Mount Miwa.
It answers Michitsuna's poem, sent with a spray of red plum, saying that his sleeves had taken the color of the flowers.
After this exchange, the third month came and his letters were as unpracticed as ever, so that the author herself sent the woman "Migakure no hodo to iu tomo ayamegusa nao shita karamu omoi au ya to."
She takes back his years, his flowers and his dyeing. The opening restates his second line. The second means: why, and to no purpose — the tone of a rebuke for having done something senseless. The word in the third means the sky and also a mind gone absent, and on it the poem turns: the sky above the flowers and a state of absent-mindedness are held together. The fourth means: in the neighborhood of the flowers. The verb in the close means to stand in a place, but it also sounds the word for cutting cloth, which joins with the dyeing that follows to make a scene of dyeing a garment. By way of cutting and dyeing, his complaint that his sleeves took the color is restated as something deliberately done: the color did not come of itself, she implies, but he went and stood by the flowers on purpose to be dyed. It is a way of declining to take the plea seriously.
- Source
- Kagero Nikki
- Other
-
- No doubt you have grown quite familiar with the ways of Katsuragi: was it then a single word, and that the end of the matter?
- Thinking how the years have gone by and come to nothing, I gaze — and find that even my sleeves have taken the color of these flowers.
- Though you may call it a season of lying hidden in the water, still I would cut below the flag and see whether hearts agree.
- Not even knowing when it is to be cut below, the wild rice will not come up into the world at all, though someone should cut for it.