春ごとに心を染むる花の枝に
誰がなほざりの袖か触れつる
誰がなほざりの袖か触れつる
- Roma-ji
-
Haru goto ni kokoro o shimuru hana no e ni taga naozari no sode ka furetsuru
- English Translation
-
Every spring my heart
is dyed into the branches
of these flowers here
and whose careless, idle sleeve
is it that has brushed them now
- Meaning
- Every spring my heart has been dyed into these flowering branches; and whose idle sleeve, I wonder, is it that has brushed them?
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 49
Headnote: a reply.
This answers the previous poem. Told that the plum has been taken for her, she replies that the flowers are hers, that she has given her heart to them year after year, and that some careless sleeve has now brushed against them.
Daini no Sanmi was Fujiwara no Kataiko, daughter of Murasaki Shikibu and Fujiwara no Nobutaka. She served as wet nurse to Emperor Go-Reizei and was granted the junior third rank.
The season is the same as in the previous poem, the falling of the plum.
The occasion was the arrival of that poem.
Fujiwara no Sadayori, her correspondent, was the son of the accomplished poet Kinto, and the exchange has been handed down as one between two wits of the day.
The first two lines say that each spring her heart soaks into the flowers; the verb is the one used of dye entering cloth. Where his poem described a single act of likening, hers describes something repeated every year, and the implication is that her claim on the flowers is the older one.
The third line takes up the plum of his poem.
The word in the fourth line means offhand, half-hearted, not in earnest. His ardent complaint is handed back to him as a passing amusement.
An interrogative particle governs the attributive form at the close. The phrase about a sleeve brushing follows the Kokin Wakashu poem asking whose sleeve had touched the plum, the same older piece used in the forty-third and forty-sixth poems.
She neither accepts his words nor refuses them: she states the depth of her own long attachment and then makes light of his. Neither rebuff nor consent, the reply shows the wit that belonged to poems of exchange.
- Author
- Daini no Sanmi
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The plum's colour and its scent I cannot tire of are as they once were and the moon of a spring night is the same keepsake as then
- Likening it to one I have never yet seen I looked at the plum and once its flowers have gone there will be no comfort left
- The wind that scatters the plum, has it too come through and blown across here for this fragrant snow of mine falls in disorder on sleeves
- Come and seek me out my house where the plum's in bloom for even coldness between people is a thing that depends upon the time