誰かまた花橘に思ひ出でん
我も昔の人となりなば
我も昔の人となりなば
- Roma-ji
-
Tare ka mata hanatachibana ni omoiidemu ware mo mukashi no hito to narinaba
- English Translation
-
Who will there be then
to remember, at the scent
of orange blossom
once I too have come to be
one of the people of old
- Meaning
- Who will remember me at the scent of orange blossom, once I too have become one of the people of the past?
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 238
Headnote: topic unknown.
A run on orange blossom begins here. This poem looks past its author's death and asks who will then remember him. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei; this is his fifth appearance in this book, after the two hundred and first and others.
The time is the season of orange blossom; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The model is the anonymous summer poem in the Kokin Wakashu in which the scent of orange blossom in the fifth month brings back the scent of the sleeves of one long known. That poem fixed the association of the flower with memory.
This piece is among Shunzei's best known.
An interrogative particle in the first line governs the auxiliary in the third; the adverb carries the sense of as before.
The second line means: by the scent of the orange blossom, taking the model's conceit unchanged.
The third line means: will remember. In the model the poet is the one who remembers; here he has moved to the position of the one remembered.
The particle in the fourth line carries the sense of I too, laying himself over the people of the past named in the model.
The close joins a perfect form to a conditional: once it has come about. Supposing his own death, he asks whether anyone will remember him, and no answer is given. The hundred and forty-third poem of Book Two and the two hundred and seventh of this book both call on something to remember; this one turns that call into a question.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- The cuckoo has passed far off beyond the cloudland so it seems, and here my thoughts do not clear at all in the season of long rain
- Through the long rain's clouds the moon is beginning now to break clear, and it had been waiting a short while for that, the cuckoo, and calls
- Who is to recall it in the days to come, then that in the evening wind it made its promise, this orange tree beside my house
- The past will not come again, and I take it for now, and fall asleep and at my dreaming pillow the orange gives its fragrance