咲く花の色は変らずももしきの
大宮人ぞたち変りける
大宮人ぞたち変りける
- Roma-ji
-
Saku hana no iro wa kawarazu momoshiki no ōmiyabito zo tachikawarikeru
- English Translation
-
Of the blooming flowers
the colors have not changed at all;
but the hundred-walled
great palace's courtiers—
it is they who have changed
- Meaning
- The colors of the blooming flowers have not changed at all; it is the courtiers of the great palace who have changed and gone.
- Commentary
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Book Six Miscellaneous Poems 1061
Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Two envoys"
The poem says that though the colors of the blooming flowers are unchanged, it is the courtiers who have changed. The long poem immediately before it (1059) is titled "A poem composed on a spring day in grief and sorrow over the ruins at Mika-no-hara"; it laments that the Kuni capital, once called a good place to live for its high mountains and pure river shallows, has become an old village where no one comes and the houses lie in ruin, closing, "how I regret that this pleasant village has fallen to ruin." This is the second of its two envoys, contrasting the unchanging colors of the flowers blooming on a spring day with the courtiers who have departed, bringing out the constancy of nature against the transience of the human world.
In Tenpyō 16 (744) Naniwa was declared the imperial capital, and in the following year, Tenpyō 17 (745), the capital was returned to Heijō; thereafter Kuni fell into ruin as a capital its people had abandoned.
The twenty-one poems from 1047 through 1067, the last poem of the book, are covered by the closing left note: "The above twenty-one poems appear in the Tanabe no Sakimaro Collection." According to this note they were taken from the Tanabe no Sakimaro Collection, and they are thought to be Sakimaro's own compositions.
The poet, Tanabe no Sakimaro, was a poet of the mid-Nara period; in Tenpyō 20 (748) he served as a clerk of the Office of Sake Brewing and acted as an envoy for the Minister of the Left, Tachibana no Moroe. He is regarded as one of the representative poets of the last phase of the Man'yōshū, carrying on the tradition of ceremonial long poems at court.
This poem's "tachikawarikeru" is the same word as "tachikawari" in the first line of 1048, which laments the ruin of Nara, so that the envoys on the ruin of the two capitals, Nara and Kuni, echo each other with the same word. Further, of the capital praised in 1055 as "the great palace site that shall not change even for a hundred ages," this poem shows with "the colors have not changed" and "it is they who have changed" what stays and what changes, turned the other way around.
The first line, "Of the blooming flowers," opens with a scene fitting the "spring day" in the title of the long poem.
The second line, "the colors have not changed at all," means that the colors remain the same, and the sense breaks here, making this a poem with a pause after the second line. "Wa" singles out the flowers' colors, setting them against "the courtiers" in the fourth line.
The third line, "but the hundred-walled," renders "momoshiki no," a pillow word for the great palace.
The fourth line, "great palace's courtiers," means "it is the courtiers." The emphatic particle "zo" singles them out strongly and is answered by "-keru" in the final line.
The final line, "it is they who have changed," means "they have been entirely replaced." The past auxiliary "keri" takes its attributive form "keru" as the conclusion answering "zo," a kakari-musubi construction, and it closes with the exclamation of realization.
- Author
- Tanabe no Sakimaro
- Source
- Manyoshu
- Prev Poem
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Mikanohara kuni no miyako wa arenikeri ōmiyabito no utsuroinureba
- Next Poem
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Arigayou naniwa no miya wa umi chikami ama otomera ga noreru fune miyu