THE MANYOSHO The Ntppon Gaku;utsu Shtnkokat Translatton of ONE THOUSAND POEMS wtth the Texts tn Romap With a New Foreword by Donald Keene Columbia University Press New York NIPPON GAKUJUTSU SHINKOKAI ]apaneso Clasucs Translattotz Comm:ttee Se11chi Tak1 (Chatrman), Impertal Academv Masaharu Anesab, Imperial Academy Nobutsuna Sasakl, Impenal Academy Izuru Shtmmura, Impenal Academy Torao Suzub, Impenal Academy Zennosuke Tsup, Imperial Academy Jtro Abe, Tohoku Impenal Umversity Sank! Ichtkawa, Tokyo Impem.l Universlt\' Spec:al Matzy'ifshii Commmee Nobutsuna Sasaki, Impenal Academy Yoshmon Yoshizawa, Kyoto Impenal Univermy (emeritus) Yosh1o Yamada, somenme of Tohoku Impenal Umvemtv Shtnbcht Hashtmoto, Tokyo Impenal Umvermy Shtgeyosht Sa1t6, Impenal Academy of Arts and Letters Yuklcht Takeda, Kokugakmn Umvemty UNESCO COLLECTION OF REPRESENTATIVE WORKS- .J APANESE SERIES Thts work has been accepted 1n the Japanese Trans• lation Series of the United N a dons Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). COPYRIGHT@ 1965 COLUMBIA UNIVEI\S!TY Pl\llSS FIRST PU!ILISH!!D 1940 BY TH!! !WANA MI SHOT!lN l'OR TH!l NIPPON GAIWJUTSU SHINK<:lKAI REISSUBD 1965 BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PR!!SS ISBN 0-231-02818-0 LIBRARY OF CONORI!SS CATALOO CARD NUMBER' 65-15376 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES Ol' AMI!R!CA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 FOREWORD The first translatwns from the Marryoshil 1nto a European language date back more than a century, well before Japan was opened to the West One "envoy" (hanka) to a long poem was translated as early as r834 by the celebrated German orientalist Heinrich Julius Klaproth (r783-r835) Klaproth, having journeyed to Siberia 1n pursuit of strange languages, encountered some dliterate Japanese castaways, fishermen, hardly ideal mentors for the study of etghth-century poetry Not surprisingly, hts translation was anything but accurate Other translations appeared from t1me to time, particu larly after the Meiji Restoration of r868, and 1n r872. a fair-sized select10n of Manyoshu poetry, some 2.oo poems 1n all, was published by the Austrian scholar August Pfizmaier (r8o8-87). Pfizmaier's absorptwn with Man yoshil studies may account for his reputation as a more than usually absent-minded professor: it is reported that he learned of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War by reading of the event, one year after it occurred, in a Japanese newspaper which had been slow in reaching Vienna. His versions, for all the singular devotion to scholarship they demonstrated, unfortunately were soon superseded by the work of the great generation of English Japanologists, notably that of Basil Hall Chamberlain (18so-r935). From the late nineteenth century onwards translations into English, German, French, or Italian frequently appeared, sometimes the work of a European scholar, sometimes that of a Japanese translating his country's literature into a foreign tongue The most satisfactory Manyoshu translations are those of the present volume. Origwally prepared by a com mittee of Japanese, scholars of both English and Japanese ill hteratures, they were subsequently revised by the Eng lish poet Ralph Hodgson, a resident of Japan at the time Collaboration between Japanese and Western scholars has often been urged as the best solution to the eternal problem of how to produce translations of dtfficult works which are at once accurate and of literary dist1nct10n but, as far as I know, The Manyoshu Is the only successful example of such collaboration Generally, the Western member of the team unconsciously seeks to recast the literal translations from the Japanese prepared by his colleagues In to an 1d10m wh1ch he himself fa vors, though It may be inappropnate, or else he mtrudes foreign 1magery and thoughts m an attempt to make the poetry more appealing to a Western audience H1s Japanese col laborators m such cases tend to refram politely from ex pressmg any objections Here, however, the combmation worked exceptwnally well, a tnbute equally to the Englishman and the Japanese The origmal edition of this translatwn was published in 1940 Since then Manyoshil studies have been extremely active m Japan, and new discoveries have repeatedly affected our understandmg of d1fferent poems To c1te a very simple example. the poem by the Emperor TenJi on the three hills Kagu, Miminashi, and Unebi (p. 5) was long considered to refer to two male hills (Kagu and Miminashi) quarreling over a female hill (Unebi), but scholars have recently suggested that Kagu and Mimi nasht were two female hills m love with the same male hill, Unebi. Other discoveries have a broader applica tion; the most important, probably, being that the Japanese language in the Manyosht7 period had e1ght vowels mstead of the present five, a fact of enormous linguistit significance though it does not affect the translations of the poems. Not only has Japanese scholarship continued to ad vance and refine previous knowledge of the Manyoshii, but Western scholarship, inspired in large part by Japanese achievements, has developed apace. The most impressive cntical study to appear m a Western language to date, Japanese Court Poetry by Robert Brower and Earl Miner (Stanford Umversity Press, 1961), treats the Many'Oshli in cons1dera ble detail and also gives a general background to the themes and methods of Japanese poetry. TranslatiOns continue to appear, some profiting by the new mterpretations of the texts, others represent ing httle more than reworkings in somewhat more poetic language of existmg versions. Interpretations of the Manyoshu have inevitably re flected the outlook of the modern critic almost as much as they conveyed the intent of the original poets Read ing the Introductwn to this edition of the ManyoshU, we cannot help but be struck by the repeated allusions to a philosophy of the Japanese state which, though normal in 1940, has largely been discredited since. Not only is the imperial authorship of many poems stressed (though more recent scholars cast doubt on these attributions, aware that anonymous poems were often dtgmfied by associations-however unlikely-with rulers of the distant past), but the glory of the Impenal House 1tself is proclaimed in a manner as fore1gn to the Japanese of today as to ourselves: "Turning to human relations, Japanese clan morality in its purified form-namely, that which is based upon the consciousness of the Imperial House as the supreme head of all clans-manifests itself in the Manyoshuin spontaneous sentiments of the loveli est kind, giving the Anthology Its chief distinction." During the war years of 1941-45, the "spirit of the Manyoshu" was constantly invoked by literary men. They meant by the phrase worship of the Emperor and an insistence on "pure Japanese" virtues untainted by foreign influence or by the over-refined, effeminate senti ments displayed in later poetry. As a result of the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Manyoshu acquired still another meaning: th1s time it was acclaimed as a "democratic" anthology that was given its chief distinction by the poetry of the common people (or of the humbler ranks of the nobility), unlike subsequent anthologies filled w1th Jejune compositions by the decadent court1ers. The poetry of the Manyoshu is suffie1ently varied and abundant to afford corroboratlve ev1dence for all these theses, but though each 1s tenable as an interpretation of part of the work, it cannot be accepted as a judgment of the whole. The compilers of this edit1on, emphasizing the "cheerfulness" of an age when the Imperial famdy ruled wlthout interference, declared that ''the prevailing atmosphere 1s happy, bright and peaceful." Yet surely the "Dialogue on Poverty" by Yamanoe Okura (p. 2.05) offers unmistakable ev1dence that, whatever conditions may have preva1led at the court, all was not joy and hght m the villages The Introduction does not dwell on the darker aspect of the Manyoshu any more than postwar mterpreters of its "democratic" character choose to examme, say, Hitomaro's profound devotion to the Imperial House. Again, such an assertion as "But filial piety, so smcere, in tense and instinctive as shown in the Manyo poems 1s not likely to be duplicated by any other people and under any other social order" is certamly open to challenge, if not to being dism1ssed outright as absurd But this nostalgic view of a distant golden age deserves our attention still, 1f only as a tradi tlonal, persistent Japanese interpretation of the ultimate meaning of the Manyoshu. Even with respect to poetics a preconceptiOn that the Manyoshu, in contrast to the artificial elegance of later Japanese poetry, is marked by a "genuineness of thought" unmarred by vanity or frivolity led the authors of the Introduction to discount technique as a maJor criterion of poetic excellence, and to dismiss as "a simple form of word-play" the highly complicated kakekotoha (pivot-words), which resemble less an ordinary pun than the portmanteau language of Finnegan's Wake 1 It m1ght seem, in the light of the shortcomings of this Introduction, at least from a contemporary point of view, that an entirely new one is desirable Certainly recent theones which trace the origin of the choka (long poem) to religious observances that were intended to quiet the souls of the dead by ree1t1ng their deeds on earth, or wh1ch suggest what the orig1nal functions of the "envoy" may have been, deserve attention. But although it is of urgent importance that the fruits of modern Japanese scholarship be introduced to Western readers, it clearly would be unfair to the translators of this edition to change arbitrarily the introduction which they deemed appropriate to their splendid translations It has seemed preferable, both out of respect for the book as origmally conce1ved, and for the sake of the valuable mformation presented, to reproduce the IntroductiOn unaltered. The great merit of The Manyoshu, it goes without say ing, is the excellence of the translations. Surely no one could read these versions of the great choka by Hitomaro or Okura and remain unmoved. They make superb poems in English, and are worthy of the origmals. Even some of the lesser works are so beautifully rendered as to ac quire an importance in translation not often accorded them in Japan-for example, the poem from the · 'Tanabe Sakimaro Collection" (pp. 1.33-34) The selection too is exceptionally intelligent, offering not only such poems of an immediate emotional or aesthetic appeal as we might expect in a volume intended for Western readers, but others which, viewed against the subsequent course of Japanese poetry, seem atypical, and even un-Japanese. These include narratives (e.g., pp. 190, 1.16, 1.1.4), "beggar songs" (p. 1.75), admonitory poems (pp. 154, q8), com memorative odes (pp. 83, 150, 21.0), and poems prefaced by extended prose explanations (pp. 74, 1.71.). These poems suggest possibilities of poetic development which either never materialized at all in Japan, or else were directed (as in the case of the poems with prose prefaces) into the domain of prose rather than poetry Another feature of the selection is the inclusion of various poems on the same themes by men of different umes, those which echo the themes and language of H1tomaro (e.g , pp 42., I2.5, 313, 46, 2.2.7, 2.33) bear Witness not only tO his enormous influence on later poets but to the mimlt able nature of hts manner, no matter how slav1shly the externals were followed The origmal texts were recorded m a script whtch used Chinese characters m an almost perversely difficult manner sometimes for meaning, somettmes for sound when read as Chmese, sometimes for sound when read as Japanese Many problems of decipherment remain to be solved, but for the general reader the pronunCiations favored by Japanese philologists when The Manyoshu first appeared in 1940 are still acceptable, though it should be borne m mmd that some vowel sounds had unfamiliar pronunciations m the eighth century, and many reconstructiOns are still tentative The reader who wtshes to follow the Japanese texts will not be far wrong 1f he consults the RomaJl versions m the back of this volume For years The Manyoshu was out of print and virtually unobtainable. Its tmportance and excellence were wtdely recognize~, but the difficulties of making arrangements wtth the various parues involved in the pubhcation made It seem dubious that a reprintmg would ever ap pear. Mr Kensuke Tamat of the Iwanami Publishing Company proved especially helpful dunng the long negotiations; indeed, Without his efforts the present edition might have had to wait for another five years or more of tedious correspondence. UNESCO sponsor ship of the new edition also encouraged us to persevere desptte repeated frustrations. Now that at last this fine translation of the greatest of Japanese anthologies has been included in the Records of Ctvilization series, 1t 1s hoped that The Manyoshu will be accorded by the read ing public its rightful place of distinction among the poetic masterpieces of the world. PREFACE The importance of rendering Japanese classics into foreign languages as a means of acquainting the world with the cultural and spiritual background of Japan can not be over-emphasized. Few Japanese, however, have ventured into this field, the work so far having been largely undertaken by foreigners. It is in view of this re grettable fact that the Japanese Classics Translation Com mittee was appointed in 1934 by the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, and the present English version of Many6 poems represents the first enterprise of the Committee. The Mmryoshu has long attr2.cted the attention of foreign translators, and there exist several versions of its poems in English, French and German, which deserve high com mendation. But the work is unwieldy material to deal with, abounding as it does in obscure and difficult pas sages, and the collaboration of a number of scholars and specialists is required in order to produce an adequate and authoritative translation. For this reason a Special Com mittee, consisting of eminent authorities on the subject, was formed. The selection of the poems for translation was based upon: r) their poetic excellence, 2) their role in revealing the Japanese national spirit and character, and 3) their cultural and historical significance. The selected poems were first paraphrased by the Special Committee into plain Japanese, and the paraphrases drafted by each member were submitted to joint sessions of the two Committees for criticism and correction. It was with the help of these paraphrases that tentative translations were made. These were then revised by an eminent English poet, and sub mitted to the Committees in full session for examination and final revision. Altogetlier it has taken four years since the work of paraphrasing was begun until the Eng lish version of the last poem was approved. It may be added that the preparation of the Romaji text entailed no small labour on the part of the Committees when investigating and deciding upon the various disputed readings. The Committee desire to acknowledge the important contributions of Messrs. Haxon Ishii and Shigeyoshi Obata, who made the tentative translations, Mr. Ralph Hodgson who revised them, and Dr. Sanki Ichlkawa who supervised all matters relating to the English. Their thanks are due also to Assistant Professor Y oshimoto End6, of the Kyoto Imperial University, and Assistant Professor Fumio Tada of the Tokyo Imperial University, the former in connection with the preparation of the Romaji text and the latter with the making of the maps. SEIICHI TAKI Chatrman of the Japanese Clas sics Translation Committee, The N1ppon Gakujutsu Shinkokai* Tokyo December, 1939 *The Japan Society for the Promotion of Scientific Research. X