A new edition of the most widely known and popular collection of Japanese poetry. The best-loved and most widely read of all Japanese poetry collections, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu contains 100 short poems on nature, the seasons, travel, and, above all, love. Dating back to the seventh century, these elegant, precisely observed waka poems (the precursor of haiku) express deep emotion through visual images based on a penetrating observation of the natural world. Peter MacMillan's new translation of his prize-winning original conveys even more effectively the beauty and subtlety of this magical collection. Translated with an introduction and commentary by Peter MacMillan.

"Compiled in the thirteenth century, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu is one of Japan's most quoted and illustrated works, as influential to the development of Japanese literary traditions as The Tale of Genji and The Tales of Ise. The text is an anthology of one hundred waka poems, each written by a different poet from the seventh century to the middle of the thirteenth, which is when Fujiwara no Teika, a renowned poet and scholar, assembled and edited the collection. The book features poems by high-ranking court officials and members of the imperial family, and each is composed in the waka form of five lines with five syllables in the first and third lines and seven syllables in the second, fourth, and fifth (waka is a precursor of haiku). Despite their similarity in composition, these poems evoke a wide range of emotions and imagery, and touch on themes as varied as frost settling on a bridge of magpie wings and the continuity of the imperial line."--BOOK JACKET.

This lavishly illustrated, oversized (17" x 10") book brings together the last major print series of the celebrated Japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849) and the Japanese poetry that inspired these beautiful prints. Whether showing semi-nude women abalone divers struggling with their catch while a male crew of shriveled old salts leers from a nearby boat, or the carefree rapture of a leisurely group of men and women observing cherry blossoms at their peak, Hokusai captures, with drama and delicacy, sublime and ridiculous states. The artist's simplicity, though deceptive, is also remarkable: he illustrates a poem about a lovers' seaside tryst with a magnificently imposing yet unadorned sailing vessel, its small window offering a coy glimpse of the fortunate couple inside. Each of the 111 color prints (as well as 41 black-and-white sketches of projected prints apparently never completed) is accompanied by the poem, in Japanese and English, a biographical note on the poet and by Peter Morse's comments on literary and artistic intention and execution.

The Hyaku-nin-isshiu, or 'Single Verses by a Hundred People', were collected together in A.D. 1235. They are placed in approximate chronological order, and range from about the year AD 670. Perhaps what strikes one most in connection with the Hyaku-nin-isshiu is the date when the verses were written; most of them were produced before the time of the Norman Conquest (AD 1066), and one cannot but be struck with the advanced state of art and culture in Japan at a time when Europe was still in a very elementary stage of civilization. The Collection consists almost entirely of love-poems and what the editor calls picture-poems, intended to bring before the mind's eye some well-known scene in nature; and it is marvellous what effect little thumbnail sketches are compressed within thirty-one syllables. Some show the cherry blossoms which are doomed to fall, the dewdrops scattered by the wind, the mournful cry of the wild deer on the mountains, the dying crimson of the fallen maple leaves, the weird sadness of the cuckoo singing in the moonlight, and the loneliness of the recluse in the mountain wilds; while those verses which appear to be of a more cheerful type are rather of the nature of the 'Japanese smile', described by Lafcadio Hearn as a mask to hide the real feelings. Japanese poetry differs very largely from anything we are used to in the West. It has no rhyme or alliteration, and little, if any, rhythm, as we understand it. The verses in this Collection are all what are called Tanka which has five lines and thirty-one syllables, arranged thus: 5-7-5-7-7 which is an unusual metre for Western ears. For this translation the editor has adopted a five-lined verse of 8-6-8-6-6 metre, with the second, fourth, and fifth lines rhyming, in the hope of retaining at least some resemblance to the original form, while at the same time making the sound more familiar to English readers. A percentage of the net sale will be donated to charities specialising in educational scholarships. YESTERDAY'S BOOKS for TOMORROW'S EDUCATIONS

"The Hundred Poets Compared discusses a print series by three of the most famous Japanese print artists of the 19th century: Kuniyoshi, Hiroshige, and Kunisada. This series of one hundred prints is known as the Ogura nazorae hyakunin isshu (Companions of the Ogura One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each) and constitutes a typical example of serial graphics from the world of Ukiyo-e." "Each print compares one of the poems from the most-beloved collection of Japanese poetry, The One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyahunin isshu), with a scene from Japanese history or theatre."--BOOK JACKET.

Hyakunin’shu: Reading the Hundred Poets in Late Edo Japan explores the “popular literary literacy” of the Japanese at the edge of modernity. By reproducing and translating a well-known annotated and illustrated Ansei-era (1854–1859) edition of the Hyakunin isshu—for hundreds of years the most basic and best-known waka primer in the entire Japanese literary canon—Joshua Mostow reveals how commoners of the time made sense of the collection. Thanks to the popularization of the poems in the early modern period and the advent of commercial publishing, the Hyakunin’shu (as it was commonly called) was no longer the exclusive intellectual property of the upper classes but part of a poetic heritage shared by all literate Japanese. Mostow traces the Hyakunin’shu’s history from the first published collections in the early sixteenth century and printed commentaries of formerly esoteric and secret exegesis to later editions that include imagined portraits of the poets and, ultimately, pictures of the “heart”—pictorializations of the meaning of the poems themselves. His study illuminates the importance of “variant One Hundred Poets,” such as the Warrior One Hundred Poets, in popularizing the collection and the work’s strong association with feminine education from the early eighteenth century onward. The National Learning (Kokugaku) movement pursued a philological analysis of the poems, leading to translations of the Hyakunin’shu into contemporary, vernacular, spoken Japanese. The poems eventually served as the basis of a card game that became a staple of New Year festivities. This volume presents some innovations in translating premodern Japanese poetry: in the Introduction, Mostow considers the Hyakunin’shu’s reception during the Edo, when male homoerotic relationships were taken for granted, and makes the case for his translating the love poems in a non-heteronormative way. In addition, the translated poems are lineated to give readers a sense of the original edition’s chirashi-gaki, or “scattered writing,” allowing them to see how each poem’s sematic elements are distributed on the page.

The lyrical world of Chinese poetry in faithful translations by Kenneth Rexroth.