Post by Please Delete on Dec 18, 2009 0:39:54 GMT -5
This is an awesome book. For anyone who wants a lighter look at waka, this seems like a great choice!
Mad in Translation
Here's an excerpt from the review posted on PMJS, including another, companion work:
Mad in Translation
Here's an excerpt from the review posted on PMJS, including another, companion work:
1) “Mad in Translation – a thousand years of kyôka, comic Japanese poetry in the classic waka mode” is a 2000-poem, 200-chapter, 740-page monster of a book. Three quarters of the poems are kyoka proper, one eighth waka that verge on being kyoka, one sixteenth kokkei ku, or what I call kyoku, and one sixteenth various forms. Of the recognized kyoka, about half are 16-17c, and most of the remainder classic Tenmei kyoka, with some later surimono kyoka added late in the writing process after I discovered scholars on the art side of the divide had paid much more attention to kyoka than people on the literary side who have mistakenly treated kyoka as a minor genre rather than the B-side of 31-mora Japanese poetry, of co-equal importance with classic waka if you value wit.
2) “Kyôka, Japan’s Comic Verse: a Mad in Translation Reader” 300 pp is a selection from the 740 pp monster with extra snake-legs for students to follow more easily. As the poems are more carefully gathered into major themes, specialists who find the monster too much to grapple with may also prefer it.
2) “Kyôka, Japan’s Comic Verse: a Mad in Translation Reader” 300 pp is a selection from the 740 pp monster with extra snake-legs for students to follow more easily. As the poems are more carefully gathered into major themes, specialists who find the monster too much to grapple with may also prefer it.
