Kotoshi yori hana sakisomuru tachibana no ikade mukashi no ka ni nioramu

English Translation

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

Meaning

This orange has only begun to flower this year: how does it come to have the scent of the old days?

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 246

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The ninth poem on orange blossom, asking how a tree flowering for the first time can carry the scent of long ago. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Fujiwara no Ietaka was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu; this is his second appearance in this book, after the two hundred and fourteenth poem.
The time is the orange season; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first line means: beginning this year. That the tree itself is new is established at once.
The verb in the second line means to begin to do a thing, the word used in the seventh and sixty-eighth poems of Book One.
The third line names the tree.
The adverb in the fourth line means how, and puts the question.
The auxiliary at the close expresses present conjecture. The contradiction is pressed: a young tree that can know nothing of the past gives out the scent of the past. Reason is turned on the received idea that the orange calls up memory. Where the run since the two hundred and thirty-eighth poem has handled the scent through feeling, this piece handles it through argument, and the key changes.

Author

Fujiwara no Ietaka

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other