A Waka Anthology, Volume Two

The story of waka, the classical tradition of Japanese poetry, from its beginnings in ancient song to the sixteenth century. The first volume, which contains almost 1,600 songs, and poems, covers the period from the earliest times to 784, and includes many of the finest works in the literature as well as providing evocative glimpses of the spirit and folkways of early Japanese civilization. The volumes include extensive commentary to introduce the poems and provide historical, biographical, and literary information. The translations of the poems aim to be both faithful to the original and alive as literature, with great attention paid to nuance, cadence, and tone. The texts drawn upon for the poems in the first volume are the ancient chronicles Kojiki, Nihonshoki, and Shoku Nihongi; the fudoki, a set of eighth-century local gazetteers; Man'yoshu, an eighth-century compendium of early poetry; and the Bussokuseki poems carved on a stone tablet at a temple in Nara. All poems are presented in facing romanization and translation. The volumes include glossarys, notes, bibliographies, conversion tables, indexes of poems by author, first-line indexes, and general indexes.