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In a chapter on “loanwords” in his book The Japanese language, Roy Andrew Miller quotes the following poem composed by H.I.H. the Crown Prince of Japan on the occasion of the New Year's Poetry Ceremony at the Imperial Palace in 1965:
This can be translated as follows: “The conveyor-belt which brings in the feed revolves and thousands of young birds cluster about it to eat.” I quote the poem not as a gem of literature, but as in a sense symbolic of modern Japan, a country which loves and clings to tradition, but is very ready to adapt it. The poem is a modern example of the ancient traditional form called tanka, or “short song”, consisting of five unrhymed lines containing 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables respectively—a form which has existed and been practised for over twelve hundred years. This tanka, though, is one which must surely have ancient tanka poets turning in their graves, not simply because the syllable count of the last two lines is all wrong, but because—horror of horrors!—it admits words of foreign origin among native Japanese words. This is obvious enough in the case of the ultra-modern word which drew Miller's attention to the poem, beruto konbea. But it applies equally to another type of word which the poem uses, namely words of Chinese origin. Words like these were available to poets in the hey-day of tanka poetry, from say 900—1300, but they were shunned like the plague. At that time, they would have stuck out like a sore thumb just as beruto konbea does today.
2 Chicago, 1967.
3 By Fujiwara Kamatari (614–69). The English versions of this and the other Man'yōshū poems which I quote are taken from The Manyōshū: One thousand poems (Tokyo, 1940; repr. New York, 1965), a translation made by a committee including the English poet Ralph Hodgson and published by the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai. The present poem is found on p. 13.
4 These poems are found in The Manyōshū, 125, 201–2, and 169–70 respectively.
5 Quoted from the introduction to Waley's, Arthur translation of The tale of Genji, London, 1935 edition, 10–11Google Scholar.
6 Tr. Keene, D. L., in Anthology of Japanese literature, London, 1955, 78Google Scholar.
7 The translation is that of Keene, in Japanese literature: An introduction for Western readers, New York, 1955, 23Google Scholar.
8 The translations here are by Keene, Anthology, 195–6.
9 Tr. Brower, R. H. and Miner, E. R., in Japanese court poetry, Stanford, 1961, 266 (see also 475)Google Scholar.
10 The translation is by Keene, Anthology, 315–6.
11 Tr. Bownas, G. and Thwaite, A., Penguin book of Japanese verse, London, 1964, 108Google Scholar.
12 Tr. Bownas and Thwaite, op. cit., 111–3.
13 Tr. Brower and Miner, op. cit., 207.
14 In Oi no kobumi, translated as The records of a travel-worn satchel by Yuasa, N., in The narrow road to the deep North and other travel sketches, Penguin Books, London, 1966. The passage quoted is on pp. 71–72Google Scholar.
15 Quoted in Ueda, M., Literary and art theories in Japan, Cleveland, 1967, 148Google Scholar.
16 A translation of this passage can be found in McCullough, Helen C., The Taiheiki, New York, 1958, 38–42Google Scholar.
17 Translations of this can be found in Keene, D. L., Major plays of Chikamatsu, New York, 1961, 418–421Google Scholar, and in Shively, D. H., The love suicide at Amijima, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, 91–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 See The Manyōshū, 216–8.
19 Quoted from his The classical poetry of the Japanese, London, 1880, 124–125 and 129Google Scholar.
20 In his Japanese poetry: The Uta, London, 1946, 55Google Scholar.
21 In Japanese court poetry, 202 (also 214).
22 ibid., 190.
23 op. cit., 66.
24 Tr. Keene, Anthology, 81; Bownas and Thwaite, op. cit., 84; Brower and Miner, op. cit., 217; Miner, in An introduction to Japanese court poetry, Stanford, 1968, 84Google Scholar.