Man'yōshū Book 15 - by Alexander Vovin Paperback

About the Book

The largest Japanese poetic anthology, thus the most important compendium of Japanese culture of the Asuka and Nara periods, is very much more than a work of literature. The author presents the Man'yoshu preserving as far as possible the flavour, sounds and semantics of the original poems. The result is a more literate but true translation.

Book Synopsis

This new translation, the lifework of the author, is fully academically oriented. Given that it is the largest Japanese poetic anthology and thus the most important compendium of Japanese culture of the Asuka period (AD 592-710) and most of the Nara period (AD 710-784), it is very much more than a work of literature, which has been the single focus of previous translations by Pierson and Suga.Thus, in this translation the author has sought to present the Man'yōshῡ to the reader preserving as far as possible the flavour, sounds and semantics of the original poems. The result is a more literate but true translation. In addition, because the realia of the Man'yōshῡ are mostly alien to both Westerners and modern Japanese, the text contains appropriate commentaries that illuminate the context. Also unique to this new version is the appearance of the original text, kana transliterations, romanization and glossing with morphemic analysis for the benefit of specialists and students of Old Japanese.

The entire translation will consist of 20 volumes, paralleling the original twenty books. The first to be published is volume 15 (announced here) one of six books written mostly in phonographic script. The author argues that the importance of book 15 lies in the fact that it contains a large number of Western Old Japanese grammatical forms and constructions that are not attested in any other Western Old Japanese text, but are extremely important in understanding this language, thereby providing a valuable foundation for all the other Man'yōshῡ texts, including those written in semantographic text. The publication sequence and anticipated dates of the remaining volumes will be announced at a future date.

About the Author

Alexander Vovin a Russian-born American historical linguist and philologist currently holding the position of Directeur d'études at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Centre de recherche sur les langues de l'Asie Orientale) in Paris. He has previously held appointments at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg (1983-1989), the University of Michigan (1990-1994), the Miami University (1994-1995), and the University of Hawai'i (1995-2013). Alexander Vovin's main interests include the early history of Japanese, Mongolian, Korean, Ainu, Manchu and other Inner and East Asian languages, as well as the early ethnolinguistic history, textology, and literature (especially poetry) of these regions. He is an author or an editor of about 100 articles and seventeen books including A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu (Brill 1993), A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose (Routledge 2003), Koreo-Japonica (University of Hawai'i Press 2010), and A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese (a revised edition of which will appear in Brill's HdO series in 2020). Together with Dieter Maue, Alexander Vovin has discovered and deciphered the earliest Mongolic language from the 6th-7th centuries AD, pushing back our knowledge of known Mongolian text by seven centuries. He is also the editor of Brill's series Languages of Asia (2003-) and co-editor (with Prof. Juha Janhunen, Finland) of the International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics (Brill 2019-). Alexander Vovin honors being elected as member of the Academia Europaea (2015), receiving the 2015 prize of the Japanese National Institute for Humanities, and receiving a European Research Commission Advanced Grant for the multinational project An Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages (2019-2023).