Yama fukami sugi no muradachi mienu made onoe no kaze ni hana no chiru kana

English Translation

The hills are so deep
that the stands of cedar there
are lost from my sight
in the wind off the summit
the flowers are scattering

Meaning

So deep are the hills that the standing cedars are hidden: in the wind off the ridge the blossom comes scattering down.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 122

Headnote: on the theme of looking at blossom on a mountain.
Two poems follow in which the falling blossom is thick enough to blot out the view. The topic named is the sight of flowers on a mountain.
The poet, given by his court title, is Minamoto no Tsunenobu (1016-1097). He rose to Major Counsellor and was accomplished in Chinese verse and in music as well as in poetry. Minamoto no Toshiyori, the poet of the forty-third poem in Book One, was his son.
The time is when the cherries fall; the place is deep in the mountains.
The occasion was the set topic.

The first line, an adjective stem with a suffix, states a cause: because the hills are deep. It is the opening of Princess Shokushi's third poem and Echizen's twenty-fourth in Book One, a construction that recurs through the spring poems of this anthology.
The second line names cedars standing in a mass. Their dark evergreen is set up as the thing to be hidden.
The third line marks degree: to the point of being invisible.
The word in the fourth line means a ridge, the high part of a mountain.
The poem closes on an exclamatory particle. The exaggeration of a whole cedar wood disappearing measures how much blossom is coming down. The poem that follows uses the same phrase of degree, and the two are set side by side.

Author

Minamoto no Tsunenobu

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other