Sasanami ya Shiga no hamamatsu furinikeri taga yo ni hikeru ne no hi naruramu

English Translation

At Sasanami
the shore pines of Shiga stand
grown old with the years
in whose reign were they pulled up
on some first day of the Rat

Meaning

The shore pines of Shiga have grown old indeed. In whose reign, I wonder, were they drawn up as seedlings on the first day of the Rat?

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 16

Headnote: a poem on the first day of the Rat, composed and offered to the Hie Shrine.
Following the turn from young herbs to the lament for age, this poem takes the seedling pines of the first day of the Rat for its subject and again writes about the passage of time. Standing before an aged shore pine, the poet thinks back to the age when it was still a sapling. The original gives no fresh attribution, which indicates that the poet is the same as in the preceding poem.
The poet is therefore Fujiwara no Shunzei.
The time is the first day of the Rat in the New Year; the place is the shore of Shiga in Omi Province, the western side of Lake Biwa. The Hie Shrine stands in that district and is the present-day Hiyoshi Taisha.
The occasion was the composition of a poem for the first day of the Rat, offered to the shrine. On that day people went out into the fields and pulled up seedling pines, praying that their long life might be shared.
Book Seven of the Shin Kokin Wakashu, the book of celebratory poems, contains many pieces on the first day of the Rat and on pines, and this poem's conception belongs with them.

The first line is a word for the Shiga district of Omi, used to summon the place name, closed by an exclamatory particle.
The second line presents the aged pines, and the verb in the third means to grow old with the years, its exclamatory auxiliary carrying the weight of a long stretch of time.
The verb in the fourth line is the action of the festival itself, drawing a seedling pine up by the roots. The great shore pines of today must once have been saplings that someone pulled: the poem reaches backward from the present. The question of whose reign it was asks after an entire age.
The closing auxiliary of present conjecture answers to the interrogative above and ends the poem as an open question. Leaving it unanswered makes the pine's span of years feel beyond measuring.
Where the previous poem grieved over the poet's own age, this one reads the changes of the world through the age of a tree. Two poems by the same hand are set together so that the subject of growing old is treated from the private and the public side at once.

Author

Fujiwara no Shunzei

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other