In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Shinkokinshū: New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern trans. by Laurel Rasplica Rodd
  • Roselee Bundy
Shinkokinshū: New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern. 2 vols. Translated and introduced by Laurel Rasplica Rodd. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 918 pages. Hardcover €214.00/$278.00.

The long-awaited publication of Laura Rasplica Rodd’s two-volume translation of Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern) now gives us a complete English translation of the second of the two royal anthologies that have been most influential across the centuries. The first, Kokinshū (Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern)—the earliest imperial anthology comprising waka—was commissioned by the imperial court, most likely in 905. Not only did it establish the basic format for all such future collections, but its verses defined to a large extent the diction and sentiments judged to be appropriate for court waka. (There are two English-language translations of Kokinshū in print: Helen C. McCullough’s and Rodd’s own, co-translated with Mary Catharine Henkenius.) Now Rodd has accomplished the monumental task of translating Shinkokinshū, which contains nearly two thousand waka. As the title Shinkokinshū suggests, the collection claims to be a new version of Kokinshū, and although it excludes poems already included in earlier imperial anthologies (while including poems from Man’yōshū), its compilers sought out compositions from as far back as the early Heian period, its preface declaring that “the jewels in the pure waters of the Sea of Ise are never exhausted no matter how many are [End Page 127] collected” (p. xlvii). At the same time, not only do the older verses in Shinkokinshū disclose a fresh reading of past poetry, but its more contemporary compositions are the product of the at times highly contested stylistic innovations of the latter half of the twelfth century and of a deepened understanding of the nature of poetry itself. Many regard Shinkokinshū as the imperial anthology possessing the highest literary value and the culminating statement of Heian court waka. Rodd’s elegant translations serve the needs and interests of both a specialist readership and readers of poetry with little or no knowledge of premodern Japanese.

Rodd’s introduction to the collection provides a succinct and engaging overview of the historical and literary context of Shinkokinshū and discusses major poets and the anthology’s structure, style, and aesthetics, this last elucidating the dominant moods of so much of Shinkokin-era waka—“deep, mysterious beauty,” “darkness and colorless of imagery,” a sense of “impermanence and evanescence,” and so on—and their association with the Buddhist worldview (p. xxi). A section of the introduction titled “Shinkokinshū Rhetoric and Language” provides an excellent introduction to Shinkokin style, often in comparison with that of Kokinshū, thus showing both Shinkokinshū’s roots in tradition and its more innovative features. The section “Structure of the Shinkokinshū Anthology” provides a concise, informative overview of the organizing principles of the anthology and of its books. Appendices in volume 2 include an author index with brief biographies as well as a first-line index. To register a minor quibble, I think that a listing of the larger subtopics within each season and an indication of which were new to Shinkokinshū might have been helpful. Other issues perhaps open to debate are how far Fujiwara Shunzei “may be said to exemplify the Shinkokinshū aesthetic and attitude toward poetic composition,” whether he was the poet “most instrumental in its development” (p. xix), and the degree to which he promoted a yūgen style and “advocated it as a poetic ideal” (p. xxi).

Regarding the last point, perhaps a bit more could have been said about the efforts of Shunzei’s son Teika and such others as Jakuren, Ietaka, and Shunzei-kyō no musume (Shunzei’s Daughter) in innovating, in the last decades of the twelfth century, a style derisively called at times “daruma uta.” Shunzei, no doubt, “fathered” the Shinkokin age (p. xx), but his attitude toward some of his associates’ inventiveness appears to have been equivocal. The fragmentation of waka into smaller units designed to resonate each one with the next—first and third line caesuras, strings of nouns filling whole lines, and noun endings...

pdf