Umegaka ni mukashi o toeba haru no tsuki kotaenu kage zo sode ni utsureru

English Translation

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

Meaning

The scent of plum sets me asking after the old days, and the spring moon does not answer; only its light lies reflected on my sleeve.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 45

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
From the same hundred-poem sequence, and again joining plum scent and moon on a sleeve. But instead of setting them at odds, this poem asks the moon a question and receives no reply. The original gives no fresh headnote.
This is Ietaka's third appearance in the book, after the seventeenth and thirty-seventh poems.
The time is a night in the plum season; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line makes the scent the occasion: fragrance calls the past back.
The second line asks after bygone days. The one addressed is left unstated until the moon of the third line takes that place.
A negative auxiliary in the attributive form gives the light that does not answer. The moon is granted a person and then its silence is remarked.
The final verb, governed by the emphatic particle, describes a state: the light lies reflected there. No answer comes back, and yet the light does reach the sleeve; a reading that takes the sleeve to be wet with tears is open here.
Where the previous poem set scent and light quarrelling, this one recasts the pair as question and silence. Both use the same sleeve, and they are placed together with their handling changed.

Author

Fujiwara no Ietaka

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other