The , commonly abbreviated as , is an early anthology of the '' waka'' form of

Japanese poetry Japanese poetry is poetry typical of Japan, or written, spoken, or chanted in the Japanese language, which includes Old Japanese, Early Middle Japanese, Late Middle Japanese, and Modern Japanese, as well as poetry in Japan which was written in th ...

, dating from the

Heian period The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. It followed the Nara period, beginning when the 50th emperor, Emperor Kammu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means in Japanese. It is a ...

. An imperial anthology, it was conceived by Emperor Uda () and published by order of his son Emperor Daigo () in about 905. Its finished form dates to 920, though according to several historical accounts the last poem was added to the collection in 914. The compilers of the anthology were four court poets, led by

Ki no Tsurayuki was a Japanese author, poet and court noble of the Heian period. He is best known as the principal compiler of the ''Kokin Wakashū'', also writing its Japanese Preface, and as a possible author of the ''Tosa Diary'', although this was publish ...

and also including

Ki no Tomonori was an early Heian period, Heian ''Waka (poetry), waka'' poet of the court and a member of the Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry, ''sanjūrokkasen'' or Thirty-Six Poetry Immortals. He was a compiler of the ''Kokin Wakashū'', though he certainly ...

(who died before its completion), Ōshikōchi no Mitsune, and Mibu no Tadamine.

Significance

The ''Kokinshū'' is the first of the , the 21 collections of Japanese poetry compiled at Imperial request. It was the most influential realization of the ideas of poetry at the time, dictating the form and format of Japanese poetry until the late nineteenth century; it was the first anthology to divide itself into seasonal and love poems. The primacy of poems about the seasons pioneered by the ''Kokinshū'' continues even today. The Japanese preface by

is also the beginning of Japanese criticism as distinct from the far more prevalent Chinese poetics in the literary circles of its day. The anthology also included a

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...

preface authored by Ki no Yoshimochi. The idea of including old as well as new poems was another important innovation, one which was widely adopted in later works, both in prose and verse. The poems of 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. This association of one poem to the next marks this anthology as the ancestor of the '' renga'' and '' haikai'' traditions.

Structure

The exact number of poems in the collection varies depending on the textual tradition. One online edition,Online edition of th
Kokin wakashu
at th
UVa Library Japanese Text Initiative
. which follows the Date Family text based on a manuscript prepared by Fujiwara no Teika, contains 1,111 poems. The collection is divided into twenty parts, reflecting older models such as the ''

Man'yōshū The is the oldest extant collection of Japanese (poetry in Classical Japanese), compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in ...

'' and various Chinese anthologies. The organization of topics is however different from all earlier models, and was followed by all later official collections, although some collections like the '' Kin'yō Wakashū'' and '' Shika Wakashū'' scaled the model down to ten parts. The following divisions of the ''Kokinshū'' mention the Japanese names of the parts, their modern readings,Miner (1985), pages 186–187McCullough and their English translations.Brower, pg 482 The compilers included the name of the author of each poem, and the or inspiration of the poem, if known. Major poets of the ''Kokinshū'' include Ariwara no Narihira, Ono no Komachi, Henjō and Fujiwara no Okikaze, apart from the compilers themselves. Inclusion in any imperial collection, and particularly the ''Kokinshū'', was a great honour.

Manuscripts

On October 20, 2010, Kōnan Women's University announced the discovery of a complete manuscript dating to . It is the oldest manuscript to contain both the Chinese and Japanese prefaces. It is split into two volumes, 15.9 cm tall by 14.6 cm wide, totaling 429 pages containing all 1111 poems. It is thought to be a copy of a manuscript made by Fujiwara no Teika, but the identity of the copier is unknown. The manuscript was purchased from a used book store in 1982 for 4,280,000 yen.

Translations

A translation by Laurel Rasplica Rodd titled ''Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern'' was published in 1984 by

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial ...

. Torquil Duthie translated a selection of one-third of the anthology under the title ''The Kokinshū: Selected Poems'', published in 2023 by

Columbia University Press Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's la ...

. Both translations won the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature: Rodd's in 1982 and Duthie's in 2023.

Notes

References

* * * * *