梅の花匂ひを移す袖の上に
軒漏る月の影ぞ争ふ
軒漏る月の影ぞ争ふ
- Roma-ji
-
Ume no hana nioi o utsusu sode no ue ni nokimoru tsuki no kage zo arasou
- English Translation
-
The plum flower's scent
has been transferred to my sleeve
and there upon it
the moonlight through the eaves' edge
contends with it for the place
- Meaning
- The plum has left its scent on my sleeve, and there the moonlight leaking under the eaves contends with it.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 44
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
Four poems now join the scent of plum to the moon. This is the first: the fragrance caught in a sleeve and the moonlight falling under the eaves are made to struggle on that same sleeve. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
This is Teika's third appearance in the book, after the thirty-eighth and fortieth poems.
The time is a night in the plum season; the place is beneath the eaves of a house.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first two lines describe scent passing from the flower into a sleeve, which recalls the practice of perfuming clothes with incense.
The third line narrows the setting to the surface of a sleeve, in deliberate contrast with the whole sky of the fortieth poem.
The fourth line names moonlight coming in through the gap under the eaves; the word used for it means light.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close. To set fragrance and light quarrelling is to give both a will, and the poem's whole conceit is packed into that one word.
Scent belongs to smell and moonlight to sight, and both are laid on a single point. Where the fortieth poem let fragrance haze an entire sky, this one draws everything down onto a sleeve: one poet handling one subject at both scales.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Teika
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Whose garden it is spring does not ask or make out but simply goes on seeking the plum at the hedge and looking at it, no more
- 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
- In the plum's fragrance I ask after the old days and the moon of spring gives no answer, only casts its light down onto my sleeve
- Whose sleeve was it brushed the plum flower, leaving this scent I would like to ask of the moon, and of whether the spring is the old spring still