Toshigoto ni oisou take no yoyo o hete kawaranu iro o tare to ka wa min

English Translation

Year after year
bamboo springs up, joint on joint,
through the passing ages—
this color that never changes,
whose could I take it to be?

Meaning

Year after year the bamboo grows anew, adding joint upon joint through age after age—whose could I take this unchanging color to be?

Commentary

Book Seven Felicitation Poems 715

Headnote: "A screen poem from the reign of Engi."
This is the first poem of the sequence on evergreen color. Bamboo grows anew each year, adding joint upon joint through the ages, and the speaker asks whose the color that never changes could be. According to the headnote, it was written for a screen in the Engi reign.
The author was one of the compilers of the Kokin wakashū.
The scene has no season specified, and the place is a stand of bamboo painted on the screen.
The direct occasion is a poem written for a screen prepared in the Engi reign.

The first line, "toshigoto ni," means "year after year." The yearly cycle is presented as the poem's unit of time.
The second line, "oisou take no," means "of the bamboo that grows anew." New shoots are added each year, and the grove continues without end.
In the third line, "yoyo o hete," "yoyo" is a pivot word joining "yo," the section between the joints of bamboo, and "yoyo," age after age. "Yo" is an associated word of bamboo, so adding joint upon joint becomes adding generation upon generation.
The fourth line, "kawaranu iro o," means "the color that does not change." As with "the color of mountain indigo has not changed" in 712 in this book, permanence is entrusted to an unchanging color.
In the last line, "tare to ka wa min," "ka wa" is rhetorical: "whose could I see it as? None but the one celebrated." The particle "ka" is concluded by the attributive form of the conjectural "n." Yearly growth is laid over the scale of generations, and the next poem, 716, also speaks of the pine whose "color changes not," continuing the evergreen hue.

Author

Ki no Tsurayuki

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other