Kokoro araba towamashi mono o umegaka ni taga sode yori ka nioi kitsuramu

English Translation

Had I any heart
I would have gone and asked it
of the plum's fragrance
from whose sleeve is it, I say
that this scent has drifted here

Meaning

If I had it in me, I would go and ask: from whose sleeve has this scent of plum come drifting to me?

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 43

Headnote: composed on the theme of plum blossom scenting the distance.
The subject is a scent of plum arriving from no visible source. The assigned topic was the fragrance of plum carrying far.
The poet is Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055-1129), a son of the Major Counsellor Minamoto no Tsunenobu. He compiled the Kin'yo Wakashu and wrote a treatise on poetry. The Monk Shune of the sixth poem was his son.
The time is the season of plum blossom; no place is given.
The occasion was the set topic.
The model is a poem in the Kokin Wakashu which prizes the scent above the colour and asks whose sleeve had brushed the plum at that house.

The auxiliary in the second line marks a contrary-to-fact wish: if I had the heart for it, I would ask. The final particle of that line carries the implication that in fact there is no way to ask.
The third line names what the question is about.
An interrogative particle in the fourth line governs the auxiliary at the close. The suspicion is that this is not the tree's own scent but one transferred to someone's sleeve, and there the model poem is taken up.
The final auxiliary expresses present conjecture: it must have come from there.
A scent arrives while its source stays out of sight, and that situation becomes longing for a person. Where the previous poem measured the distance from outside a hedge, here even the flower is invisible and only the scent remains; the distance has grown.

Author

Minamoto no Toshiyori

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other