"in the village / where white snow had once fallen / spring has, I see, now arrived"

The Shinkokin(waka)shu, "New collection of older and recent (Japanese poems)," was the eighth imperially commissioned anthology of poetry in Japanese, and is generally considered the best and most important one after the Kokinshu (together with the Man'yoshu, they are the three cornerstones of classical poetry). It was compiled around 1205 near the end of the Heian period, almost exactly 300 years after the Kokinshu it emulated, and it is interesting to compare how the fashions of style changed in that time.

The most obvious is a shift in emphasis from voice and wit to image and emotional resonance. There's a greater reliance on concrete nouns instead of verbs, and many poems end on a noun phrase without a main verb. It looks like there are fewer speculative conjugations and deductions from appearance and more direct presentation of the (supposed) scene, but my sample size is too small to confirm this, ah, speculation. The poems are, also, the work of the first intertextual generation, who systematically developed the technique of "allusive variation" by partial quotation of one or more earlier poems from the canon, using the sources to provide additional resonance.

Below are translations of a random baker's dozen of seasonal poems from the first six books. There's no method to my choices aside from (obviously) the opening handful and getting one from each season -- they just caught my eye. My notes are light on the biographicals and allusions, and don't even touch the elaborate system of association and progression that govern the arrangement of poems. This should do for non-scholarly comparison, though.

( Ephemeral beauty prefers being hidden behind a cut tag )

---L.

(Index for this project)