Composed looking at a cherry tree, blooming in the Fourth Month.
あはれてふ事をあまたにやらじとや春におくれてひとりさくらむ
aFare teFu koto wo amata ni yarazi to ya Faru ni wokurete Fitori sakuran |
‘How moving!’ Should those oft repeated words Not go to the others? Left behind by Spring, This single blooming cherry. |
Ki no Toshisada
Is this translation correct?
I’m so happy,
How surprised I was,
It’s the end of Spring,
I bloomed alone
in the middle of the cherry garden.
No. As the headnote suggests, this poem is the poet expressing his own thoughts at the sight of a cherry tree blooming in the Fourth Month, when all the other trees have finished. It’s very unusual for waka to assign agency to inanimate objects, so it’s not really possible to interpret this as the poet putting words in the cherry tree’s ‘mouth’. A narrative explanation of the poem’s meaning, making explicit those elements which are left implicit, would be ‘All the cherry trees which bloomed earlier were said to be wonderful, but maybe that expression is more suited to this tree blooming here alone’.