The Kokinshu, also known as the "Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems," is a Japanese poetry anthology compiled in the early 10th century. It is considered one of the most important works of Japanese literature and has had a significant influence on the development of the Japanese language and literature.
The Kokinshu was compiled by Ki no Tsurayuki, a scholar and poet who served as the governor of Tosa Province in the late 9th and early 10th centuries. The anthology consists of a total of 1,111 poems, including both waka (Japanese-style poetry) and tanka (a type of waka that consists of five lines with a total of 31 syllables). The poems are organized into 20 books, each of which is named after a different theme or topic, such as love, nature, and travel.
One of the most notable features of the Kokinshu is its use of kana, a phonetic writing system that was developed in Japan during the 9th century. The use of kana in the Kokinshu was revolutionary at the time, as it allowed for the representation of the spoken language in writing and made it possible for common people to read and write poetry. The Kokinshu is also credited with helping to standardize the Japanese language, as it introduced a consistent orthography and syntax that would be used in subsequent works of Japanese literature.
In addition to its contributions to the development of the Japanese language and literature, the Kokinshu is also notable for its artistic and literary merit. The poems in the anthology are known for their beauty, depth, and emotional expressiveness, and many of them are still considered classics of Japanese literature. The Kokinshu also includes a number of poems by female poets, which is rare for a work of this time period.
Overall, the Kokinshu is a vital and influential work of Japanese literature that has had a lasting impact on the development of the Japanese language and culture. It remains an important part of the Japanese literary canon and is widely studied and appreciated by scholars and readers alike.
Shin Kokin Wakashū
The term "Honkadori" refers to the practice of "allusive variation," and can be literally translated as "taking from an original poem". Major poets of the Kokinshū include Kokinshū, was a great honour. Of the approximately 450 anonymous poems, many are believed to derive from oral traditions of folk song, though some Heian and medieval commentaries assert, plausibly enough, that the editors deliberately identified as anonymous certain poems by those of the highest social rank, others by persons of very low status, some of those by the compilers themselves, and poems which tended to impinge upon various taboos. The final section of the chapter discusses Tokieda Motoki's argument that since poetry was used in everyday life as a medium of communication, the aesthetic value of a poem was often less important than its performative value. The four compilers chose some 243 poems of their own and many anonymous poems. Chapter 1 and 2 provide a sort of bird's eye view of the social world behind the waka phenomenon. Along a somewhat different axis, scholars and critics of recent years have debated whether this interrogative mood reflects the ironic affirmation of a recently acquired technical facility of poetic expression, or rather a sense of nostalgic resignation, even of despair, inspired perhaps by the dissemination of Buddhist doctrine, or by the increasing political hegemony of the Fujiwara clan, or by some combination thereof.
Waka is approached here as a cultural phenomenon, that is, a complex system of people, practices, and ideas centering around the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural artifacts. I especially enjoyed the poems about nature because it seemed related to other poems we have read in the past. If we see haikai as marking the lower bound of decorum, then as its antithesis yugen represented, at least for medieval readers, the surpassing ideal which few poems in fact achieved. Henkenius Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 ; and Kokin Wakashu: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, translated by H. Even though a lot of the poems have a common theme of nature, each of the poets is able to capture different aspects of it and express them in varying ways.
Kokin Wakashu is an anthology of 1,111 Japanese poems in the most widely circulated editions compiled and edited early in the 10th century. I truly appreciate the way each poem is able to convey a different emotion even though they are written similarly. There are a number of mostly minor discrepancies among these three texts, and a handful of what are presumed to be scribal errors in the Date Family text. Write down your observations. The first of a long series of imperially-commissioned Japanese poetry anthologies, the Kokinshu is unrivaled in its importance and influence. Each poem taps into your emotions quite easily and effectively if you keep an open mind, despite not being immediately obvious at times.
Duthie provides translations and interpretations of the two prefaces to the Kokinshū, which deeply influenced Japanese literary aesthetics. Ki no Tsurayuki received an imperial commission to act as supervisor of the compilation of what would be the Kokinshu. The second date is today's date — the date you are citing the material. I think thats very important that the reader feels the emotions of the poet and can imagine it through the descriptions. McCullough Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1984. One of which that I particularly enjoyed was poem 70, from Book 2: Spring.
Did not research it any further but really peeked my interest as to what the significance of using five lines of poetry could symbolize, especially with such a captivating culture. The Heian Court and Kana Writing 6. Among the other significant poets included are Ono no Komachi, Ariwara no Narihira, and Oshikochi no Mitsune. Compiled in the early tenth century, the Kokinshū is an anthology of some eleven hundred poems that aimed to elevate the prestige of vernacular Japanese poetry at the imperial court. Tsurayuki was joined by three other poets of minor-court rank—Ki no Tomonori, Oshikochi no Mitsune, and Mibu no Tadamine—in selecting the best examples of Japanese poetry and arranging them in the best fashion.
An Analysis of the Poems The Kokinshu, Returning to the Farm to Dwell, and Thoughts While Traveling at Night
In addition, his editions typically appear to have included numerous interlinear notations giving textual variants, proposed emendations, identifications of certain poets by alternative names or titles, etc. UVa Library Etext Center: Japanese Text Initiative Introduction What Is Kokin Wakashu? The latter was embraced by Nijo poets as the "Proper Style" shofu for waka, sometimes described by them as hitofushi mezurashi "a single phrase of invention" , and ridiculed by their rivals as gokushin sincere, or naive, to a fault. The last date is today's date — the date you are citing the material. The many forms of such arrangements include temporal progression through the seasons and through the stages of a courtly love affair, sub-sequences of topical images with subtle variations in treatment, alternation of anonymous older poems with those by contemporary new or modern authors and of rhythmic forms poems with a caesura after the second vs. Brower and Earl Miner have praised the contributors to the Kokinshu for their use of new words and new imagery. The primacy it accounts to the seasons is still the case in modern haiku, while the progression of its poems influenced the development of renga. .
Waka After the Kokinshu: Anatomy of a Cultural Phenomenon
It was commissioned in 1201 by the Shin Kokinshū covered a broader range of poetic ages than the Kokinshū, including ancient poems that the editors of the first anthology had deliberately excluded. I can feel the emotion from the poems in Book 2, where the author actually tried to ask the flower not to fall of from the branch. The Kokinshū were ordered temporally; the love poems, for instance, though written by many different poets across large spans of time, are ordered in such a way that the reader may understand them to depict the progression and fluctuations of a courtly love-affair. Ownership has since changed but it is still widely referred to as the Date Family text. Gale Cengage 1999 eNotes.
That how this experience went for me. Chapter 3 deals with the ideas and beliefs that motivated and sustained the waka phenomenon of the tenth century. It appears that each book holds a different theme in which the poems reflect. Nature can be described in many different perspectives, and the poet of The Kokinshu is very imaginative and has conveyed emotional points. The most important and most copied of all the poets whose works are represented in the Kokinshu, Tsurayuki is also the author of its Japanese preface. The specific text on which the Japanese Text Initiative e-text is based is one of only two Teika holograph manuscripts known to be extant and the only one available for scholarly use in the form of facsimile editions.
UVa Library Etext Center: Japanese Text Initiative
Other translators favor literal description with additional explanation in footnotes, arguing that the text is more than a thousand years old and commentary is essential to understanding the original authors' intentions. The poems of the Kokinshu seem to be ordered in a particular way to interact with readers. Between these limits lay an ideal often referred to as ushin "mindful," literally, or serious, stately, etc. Retrieved October 22, 2010. The KokinshūText and Its Commentarial Tradition 11. The Kokinshū Text and Its Commentarial Tradition 11. Well over half of the poems are attributed to nearly 130 known or named poets, mostly of the late 9th century.
The Kokinshu: Selected Poems by Torquil Duthie, Paperback
These eminently readable and often beautiful translations will appeal to a new generation of readers in Japanese studies and beyond. This is true to some extent, but it is also the case that it was the first anthology compiled when there was an awareness that there was such a thing as waka, Japanese poetry yamato uta which was somehow different from the Chinese poetry kara uta the court had brought in from overseas, and that it contains numerous fine examples of lyrical expression. Considered the epitome of Japanese poetry for a thousand years, the Kokinshu which loosely translates as "A Collection of Old and New Poems" is an anthology of poems, or waka, from the Heian dynasty, which marked the end of Chinese poetry's domination in Japan. . The Ideal Poem The immense prestige of Kokinshu as the unrivalled canon of classical waka throughout most of the tradition, especially after its recanonization in the late 12th century, assured that the limits on the range of acceptable tonal in an esthetic sense variations on a given poetic motif, even more so than the rules of decorum governing choices of diction and topics per se, were assumed to have been fixed by the precedents of this anthology.
