Nagamu tote hana ni mo itaku narenureba chiru wakare koso kanashikarikere

English Translation

Coming out to look
I have grown too used to them
these flowers, and so
the parting when they scatter
is a grief I did not want

Meaning

Coming out to look at them, I have grown all too familiar with the flowers, and so the parting when they fall is the harder to bear.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 126

Headnote: topic unknown.
The poem argues that becoming familiar with the flowers is what makes the parting painful. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The Monk Saigyo, whose lay name was Sato no Norikiyo, served Retired Emperor Toba as a guard of the northern quarters and took orders at twenty-three. In Book One he is the poet of the seventh, twenty-seventh, fifty-first, seventy-ninth and eighty-sixth poems.
The time is when the cherries fall; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first line means: with the intention of looking. Days spent going out to see the flowers stand behind it.
The adverb in the second line means excessively.
The verb in the third line means to grow familiar with, in a perfect concessive form with a conditional particle: because I have grown used to them.
An emphatic particle in the fourth line governs the concessive form at the close. The falling of the flowers is called a parting, on the model of parting from a person.
That intimacy makes separation harder is an argument that exposes a man under vows deepening his attachment to blossom. Egyo's hundred and seventeenth poem lamented that leaving the world had done no good; this one accepts the same problem as the consequence of his own familiarity.

Author

The Monk Saigyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other