Shinkokinshū: New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern trans. by Laurel Rasplica Rodd (review)

The arrival of Laurel Rodd's translation of Shinkokinshū has been much anticipated and means that waka specialists and poetry lovers can now enjoy a complete version of the imperial anthology which is regarded as the pinnacle of the literary achievement of the court nobility. Commissioned by Emperor Gotoba in 1201, and presented in 1205 to mark the three hundredth anniversary of its illustrious predecessor, Kokinshū, the "New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern" was intended to mark the literary and cultural ascendancy of the court, now that much of its other authority was gone.

The anthology contains 1,978 (or 1,979) poems, depending upon the manuscript, divided into 20 "books": the first six cover the seasons—spring (2), summer, autumn (2), and winter; then single "books" on Felicitations, Laments, Parting, and Travel; five on Love; three of Miscellaneous poems; and finally one "book" each on Shintō and Buddhist themes. Rodd's translation presents the poems in transcription and translation in parallel, and follows them with brief comments and explanations. She provides a translation of Fujiwara no Yoshitsune's Japanese preface, a translator's introduction to the entire work, and two appendices. The latter offer brief biographies of the poets of the anthology and brief accounts of the texts from which it was drawn, each with listings of the numbers of relevant poems. There is also an index of first lines, a bibliography of works consulted, and an index to the translator's introduction.

Undoubtedly the product of intense creative effort over many years, by any measure, the translation is a singularly impressive achievement containing many beautifully translated poems and opening a window onto the literary and cultural world of early Kamakura Japan. For my part, I was particularly moved by Book VIII: Laments and the seemingly effortless way Rodd conveys in English the tones of grief and loss found in the originals, but I am certain that other readers will find other individual poems and sections to love. Faced with this work, it seems simultaneously astonishing and disturbing that the last complete translation of a chokusenshū (a poetry anthology commissioned and compiled by imperial command) was Helen McCullough's Kokinshū (1985), succeeding Rodd's own translation of the same work (1984) by only a year.¹ Ever since, we have had to make do with excepts from these, and other, anthologies, such as those found in works by Steven Carter (1991) and Edwin Cranston (1993, 2006)²; excellent though these volumes are, there is no doubt that one can only understand and appreciate the overall import of an anthology by reading the complete work, and this new translation provides the opportunity to do so.

Poetry is one of the most challenging types of text to translate, requiring an in-depth understanding of the expressions, techniques, and nuances of both the source and target languages. As with all literary translation, the translator must strive to balance the beauties of the original against the limitations—syntactic, semantic, and euphonic—of the target. Because premodern Japanese waka are defined structurally by division into sections of 5–7–5–7–7 syllables, defined culturally by the seasons and society of the court nobility, and defined literarily by the canon of prior poetry, it may seem an insurmountable task to translate them into English. The translator must make an initial set of decisions to guide the work and make it coherent, all the while accepting that making one decision will have an impact on other aspects of the translation.

For waka, one must decide whether to replicate the 31-syllable structure of the Japanese versions in their translations. On the one hand, doing so produces results which, by virtue of being structurally identical to their originals, give readers an experience which is closer to that produced by the originals, produces versions which can have a closer textual resemblance to the originals, and also imposes...