このほどは知るも知らぬも玉鉾の
行きかふ袖は花の香ぞする
行きかふ袖は花の香ぞする
- Roma-ji
-
Kono hodo wa shiru mo shiranu mo tamahoko no yukikau sode wa hana no ka zo suru
- English Translation
-
In these days, alike
those I know and those I don't
on the jewelled road
the sleeves of all who pass by
carry the scent of flowers
- Meaning
- In these days, strangers and acquaintances alike, the sleeves of everyone going along the road carry the scent of the flowers.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 113
Headnote: composed among fifty poems set by Cloistered Prince Shukaku.
The third poem on the scent of blossom, and the close of that run. The two before it kept the fragrance to one person's robe or pillow; this one finds it on everyone in the street, and the field opens at a stroke. The headnote assigns it to a set of fifty poems commissioned by Cloistered Prince Shukaku, a son of Emperor Go-Shirakawa and abbot of Ninna-ji.
Fujiwara no Ietaka was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. In Book One he is the poet of the seventeenth, thirty-seventh, forty-fifth and eighty-second poems.
The time is the height of the cherry season; the place is a road where people come and go.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The first line means in these days, the few days of the flowering.
The second line takes in acquaintances and strangers alike, a way of levelling all distinctions; it is the form of Yakamochi's eighty-fifth poem in Book One, which took in everyone going and coming.
The third line is a pillow word attaching to the word for road. The word itself never appears, and the verb of coming and going in the fourth line stands in its place.
The fourth line makes sleeves rather than people the subject, and the word repeats the waking sleeve of the previous poem.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive verb at the close. A fragrance that belonged to a private bedchamber has reached the sleeves of a crowd of strangers. Across three poems the scent widens from robe to pillow and from pillow to the open road.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Ietaka
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- With the flowers' fragrance my robe has grown deeply steeped here in the shadow beneath the trees, and just as the wind would have it, no more
- The wind comes across and on my sleeve as I wake the flowers' fragrance is in the pillow, scenting the dream of a night in spring
- Shall I see again at Katano, the hunting of the flowering the snow of the blossom falls at daybreak in the springtime
- Fallen or not yet and what I cannot make out through the haze of spring is the cherry on the hills where the long cloud lies trailing