Selections from Man’yōshū by Various Authors
Selections from Man'yōshū by Various Authors
0 John G. Peters University of North Texas , USA
1 Part of the International and Area Studies Commons, Japanese Studies Commons , Poetry Commons
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At the sound of the pounding
of horses’ hooves
I go and look out
from the shade of the pines
perhaps it is you
John Peters Man’yōshū 7: 1263
Night crows caw
the coming dawn
still it is silent
above these
summit treetops
Sending you away to Yamato
in deepening night
I stood
till wet with
the dew of dawn
Anonymous Princess Ōku
Fal
In the dew
of the mountain
I stand waiting for my love
in the dew
of the mountain
John Peters Man’yōshū 2: 108
Waiting for me
at the mountain
you were wet with dew
I wish
I were that dew
In the spring garden
the scent of
red peach blossoms
illuminates a woman walking
the paths below
TransFernc
Lady Ishikawa Ōtomo Yakamochi
Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) is an anthology of
poems from ancient Japan; nearly all appear to have been written roughly
between 625 and 760 A.D. The anthology is said to have been culled from no
longer extant earlier anthologies and comprises 4,516 poems in twenty books or
scrolls by over 400 identified poets and numerous others who are unidentified.
Of the six translations included here, two were written by unidentified poets.
The other four have their authors listed. About Japanese poetry of this time, the
poetic line is not based upon the number of stressed syllables, as is Anglo-Saxon
poetry, or upon the number of stressed syllables in conjunction with the number
of overall syllables, as is blank verse, or upon patterns of rhyming, as is much of
Western poetry—but instead upon the total number of on (sounds), which is the
linguistic concept of a mora. Man’yōshū consists of two kinds of such poetry, chōka
and waka, chōka being long poems of indefinite length with alternating lines of
5 and 7 on, and waka being single-line poems with divisions of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7
on. Fewer than 400 of the poems in Man’yōshū are chōka, and the translations
included here are all waka. As was true of ancient Chinese poetry, subtlety and
understatement are valued in Japanese poetry of this period, and in translating
these waka, I have sought to maintain the understatement of the original
Japanese poems. For example, the image of dew appears with some frequency in these
poems and is understood to represent not only literal dew but also tears. Along
with trying to maintain the subtlety and understatement, I have also sought to run
the difficult middle course of faithfully translating the meaning and spirit of the
original Japanese while at the same time attempting to produce good poetry in
English. (...truncated)