ももしきの大宮人は暇あれ夜桜翳して今日も暮らしつMaybe. Or maybe I'm making it too snarky:
momoshiki no oomiyahito (oomiyabito) ha itoma are
yasakura kazashite kefu mo kurashitsu
the courtiers from the great palace
have too much time on their hands
wasting time waving cherry branches around,
this evening,
again
the court is at at leisure again today—
waving cherry branches in the evening
It's by YAMABE no Akahito (700–736), one of the 36 "poetry immortals". This version is from Shin Kokin Wakashuu (新古今和歌集、New Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poetry), which was compiled for the court in the 13th century, for the 300th anniversary of the first Kokin Wakashuu. The poem also appears in the Wakan Roueishuu (和漢朗詠集, Japanese and Chinese Poems for Recitation), compiled a century later, in about 1013.
Some of the imagery seems to have been picked up in Genji, also early 11th c.:
いつとなく大宮人の恋にCranston explains this scene as from a cherry blossom party (hanami?) given by the Minister of the Right and suggests that it recalls Yamabe's poem from the Roueishuu. Interesting that he takes 翳す kazasu, which I think currently means holding something up over one's head and/or waving it, or shading one's eyes, etc., as actually wearing the cherry blossoms on their head, as garlands or crowns. He also groups や with the preceding thought (itoma are) rather than the next thought (sakura), which shifts it from a substantive (evening cherry blossoms) to a kireji ("cutting" particle) for the preceding line. This や seems to always be written with kana in these poems, so it's hard to tell; by strict meter, it seems not to fit into either phrase. And he approaches the poem as a question: "Are they so leisured?" (Emphasis added.)
さくらかざしゝけふもきにけり
itsu to naku oomiyahito no koishiki ni
sakura kazashishi kyou mo kinikeri
I miss them always,
The people of the great palace
So dear to me—
Ah, but see the day has come
We wore cherry on our brows!
(trans. Edwin Cranston, A Waka Anthology—not sure how the tenses work here)
Genji's author, the tentatively identified "Lady Murasaki", was the daughter of a poet and scholar in Chinese and was educated in the Chinese classics, so she probably would have been exposed to the Roueishuu, which was completed just as she was finishing Genji. She seems to have known the poet and critic FUJIWARA no Kintou, who compiled the Rueishuu; at any rate they probably would have run in the same circles at court. They may have discussed Kintou's choices, and she may even have seen drafts. (Lady Murasaki and her father also were Fujiwara, though there may have been no particular connection.)
Like Genji, Yamabe traveled with courtiers, the court of Emperor Shoumu, during the twelve years before Yamabe's death in 736—so he'd probably be very familiar with lounging courtiers. Of course, one could argue that to compose a poem about lounging courtiers is even more precious than the courtiers' lounging. ("Was he so leisured? Writing a poem about lounging courtiers, today, again....")
Interestingly, an older version in the Man'youshuu, also attributed to Yamabe (and collected in the late 8th c., much closer to his lifetime), is slightly different:
大宮人は暇あれや梅をかざしてここに集へるThe excellent Japanese Text Initiative also gives the Chinese original of the poem, per the Man'youshuu: 百礒城之大宮人者暇有也梅乎挿頭而此間集有. I can't begin to read the Chinese, but the kanji align (by meaning or sound) with the plum/meeting version in the Man'youshuu. I wonder why the change to sakura from ume. Was this a later revision by the poet? Or did Kintou, who was the biggest of all cheeses in poetics at the time, decide he liked it better that way? If so, what other works might he have altered while "collecting" them?
oomiyahito ha itoma are
yaume o kazashite koko ni tsudoheru
the courtiers are at leisure
they meet up here, waving plum branches (in the evening)
Funny coincidence: as I was writing this I was surfing around, looking at palaces and temples from the Nara and Heian periods, and I ended up at an online museum, looking at a manuscript of the Roueishuu that I'd found through a listing of national treasures of Japan. (There's a whole category just for documents.) The manuscript is zoomable, so I thought I'd try to read some of it; I focused on the first thing I could kinda read, in a kana section.... sakura kazashite....something something, kurashitsu.... Wait a minute! So I read the line to the right, and, sure enough, it was "momoshiki no oomiyahito ha itoma are". The rest of the lefthand line was the rest of the poem, plus "Akahito". Nice to run into the poem so randomly.
