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is the oldest existing, and most highly revered, collection of Japanese poetry, compiled sometime in the Nara or early Heian periods. The compiler, or the final in a series of compilers, is believed to be Ōtomo no Yakamochi, and the last datable poem in the collection is from 759. The collection contains many poems from much earlier, many of them anonymous or misattributed (usually to well-known poets), but the bulk of the collection represents the period between 600 and 759.
The collection is divided into twenty parts or books, mirroring a similar practice in collections of Chinese poems of the time; this number was followed in most later collections. Unlike later collections, however, the parts of the ''Man'yōshū'' are not organized into topics or ordered chronologically. The collection contains 265 ''chōka'' (long poems), 4,207 ''tanka'' (short poems), one ''tanrenga'' (short connecting poem), one ''bussokusekika'' (poems on the Buddha's footprints at Yakushi-ji in Nara), four ''kanshi'' (Chinese poems), and 22 Chinese prose passages. There is no preface: the format of prefacing official collections, such as the ''Kokin Wakashū'', developed later.
It is standard to regard the ''Man'yōshū'' as a particularly Japanese work. This does not mean that the poems and passages of the collection differed starkly from the scholarly standard (in Yakamochi's time) of Chinese literature and poetics. Certainly many entries of the ''Man'yōshū'' have a continental tone, earlier poems having Confucian or Taoist themes and later poems reflecting on Buddhist teachings. Yet, the ''Man'yōshū'' is singular, even in comparison with later works, in choosing primarily Yamato themes, extolling ''Shintō'' virtues of and . In addition, the language of many entries of the ''Man'yōshū'' exerts a powerful sentimental appeal to readers:

[T]his early collection has something of the freshness of dawn. [...] There are irregularities not tolerated later, such as hypometric lines; there are evocative place names and []; and there are evocative exclamations such as ''kamo'', whose appeal is genuine even if incommunicable. In other words, the collection contains the appeal of an art at its pristine source with a romantic sense of venerable age and therefore of an ideal order since lost.^[1]

The collection is customarily divided into four periods. The earliest dates to prehistoric or legendary pasts, from the time of Yūryaku (r.?456–?479) to those of the little documented Yōmei (r.585–587), Saimei (r.594–661), and finally Tenji (r.668–671) during the Taika Reforms and the time of Fujiwara no Kamatari (614–669). The second period covers the end of the seventh century, coinciding with the popularity of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, one of Japan's greatest poets. The third period spans 700–c.730 and covers the works of such poets as Yamabe no Akahito, Ōtomo no Tabito and Yamanoue no Okura. Akahito chiefly among them is resolutely Japanese; the rest freely incorporate and adapt Continental elements. The fourth period spans 730–760 and includes the work of the last great poet of this collection, the compiler Ōtomo no Yakamochi himself, who not only wrote many original poems but also edited, updated and refashioned an unknown number of ancient poems.
In addition to its artistic merits, the ''Man'yōshū'' is important for using one of the earliest Japanese writing systems, the cumbersome ''man'yōgana''. Though it was not the first use of this writing system, which was also used in the earlier Kojiki (712), it was influential enough to give the writing system its name: "the kana of the ''Man'yōshū''". This system uses Chinese characters in a variety of functions: their usual ideographic or logographic senses; to represent Japanese syllables phonetically; and sometimes in a combination of these functions. The use of Chinese characters to represent Japanese syllables was in fact the genesis of the modern syllabic kana writing systems, being simplified forms (''hiragana'') or fragments (''katakana'') of the ''man'yōgana''.
Julius Klaproth was the first to publish any translation of ''Taika'' era Japanese poetry in the West.^[2] Donald Keene explained in a preface to the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai edition of the ''Manyōshū:''
: "One 'envoy' (''hanka'') to a long poem was translated as early as 1834 by the celebrated German orientalist Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783-1835). Klaproth, having journeyed to Siberia in pursuit of strange languages, encountered some Japanese cataways, fisherman, hardly ideal mentors for the study of 8th century poetry. Not surprisingly, his translation was anything but accurate."^[3]
The ''Man'yōshū'' has been accepted in the Japanese Translation Series of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).^[4]

Contents

References

Footnotes

External links

References

★ A Waka Anthology: Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup, Cranston, Edwin A. , , , Stanford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-8047-3157-8

★ The Manyoshu: A New and Complete Translation, Honda, H. H. (tr.), , , The Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, 1967,

★ Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, Kodansha, , , Kodansha, 1983,

★ The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of the Man'yoshu, Levy, Ian Hideo, , , Princeton University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-691-00029-8

★ 1000 Poems From The Manyoshu: The Complete Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai Translation, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, , , Dover Publications, 2005, ISBN 0-486-43959-3

★ Online edition of the ''Man'yōshū''

★ Titsingh, Isaac, ed. (1834). [Siyun-sai Rin-siyo/Hayashi Gahō, 1652], ''Nipon o daï itsi ran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon.'' Paris: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland

Footnotes

External links

★ Kanji Haitani's Man'yoshu Best 100, with explanations and translation.

★ 2001 Waka: The Man'yôshû