橘の匂ふあたりのうたた寝は
夢も昔の袖の香ぞする
夢も昔の袖の香ぞする
- Roma-ji
-
Tachibana no niou atari no utatane wa yume mo mukashi no sode no ka zo suru
- English Translation
-
Where the orange gives
its fragrance, if I doze there
even in my dream
there is the scent of the sleeves
of one I knew long ago
- Meaning
- Dozing where the orange is in scent, I find that even my dream carries the fragrance of the sleeves of someone long ago.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 245
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The eighth poem on orange blossom, taking the model's words almost unchanged and carrying the scent into a dream. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, known as the daughter of Shunzei, was in fact his granddaughter and adopted daughter. In Book One she is the poet of the forty-seventh poem, in Book Two of the hundred and twelfth and others, and in this book of the hundred and seventy-ninth.
The time is the orange season; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The model is the anonymous summer poem of the Kokin Wakashu on the scent of the sleeves of one long known. Shunzei's two hundred and thirty-eighth poem draws on it as well.
The first two lines fix the place by the reach of the scent.
The word in the third line means a light sleep taken without properly going to bed, used in the hundred and ninety-seventh and two hundred and forty-second poems.
The particle in the fourth line carries the sense of the dream as well as the waking world. Princess Shokushi's two hundred and fortieth poem set the orange at a dreaming pillow; here the scent reaches into the content of the dream.
The closing words are the model's own, with an emphatic particle governing the attributive form. Of all the poems in this run it follows the model most closely in wording, and by adding the doze and the dream it carries a waking memory over into sleep.
- Author
- The Daughter of Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- He whom I should seek is here at the eaves' edge, in this old dwelling place and I wonder if it's him the orange in the garden
- The cuckoo has found the orange blossom's fragrance and follows it, and if it calls, is it longing for someone it knew of old
- Only from this year has it begun to flower this orange, and how does it give the fragrance of the days that are long gone by
- At evening, of which cloud is it the remnant, then the wind that comes now and blows across the flowers of the orange, I wonder