Waiting for the Wind: Thirty-Six Poets of Japan's Late Medieval Age

by Steven D. Carter

Book Overview

The only collection in English of these works, Waiting for the Wind presents over four hundred poems by thirty-six poets of Japan's late medieval age (1250 --- 1500). The poems are all in the uta form... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231068549
• ISBN13: 9780231068543
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 353 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Wistful Wind Down of Waka

Five lines, thirty-one syllables, and a deliberately restricted range of topic, imagery, and mood--the perfect way to paint a poetic tradition into a corner, one would think. And that's indeed kind of what we see happening here in "Waiting for the Wind," which features courtly waka poetry from the form's second flowering around the time of the Shin-Kokinshu in 1206 to its final burst with the monk-poet Shotetsu in the 1400's along with its subsequent dwindling. Don't get me wrong, there are some excellent poems in this anthology, poems that are original and yet disciplined by tradition, deeply moving and yet subtle and understated, evocative of the milder beauties of nature and the plaintive permutations of the human heart. But the majority by far are just short of mediocre and tired; pretty, elegant, and graceful to a fault but clearly not much more than the aftertrace of an obligatory aristocratic social accomplishment. A few are even eye-rollingly dull and as close to vapid as poetry can be and still be poetry rather than doggerel verse--but they were acclaimed among poetry cliques of the time and so have a certain importance in terms of literary history. And that seems to be the driving impulse behind this anthology, the organizing principle as it were: not what poems are the finest and most excellent by our contemporary standards but what poems were considered exemplary and important among different poets within the tradition at the time (or traditions, rather, as we'll see). Luckily these overlap sometimes, of course. But not necessarily, and if some of the poems aren't the best on our terms this fact is more than offset by this book's significance and usefulness as a study in literary history, which the author/translator augments by including a clear and insightful discussion of each poet and his or her place in the ongoing, lingering and polemically hostile rift among three poetry factions (the Nijo, the Reizei, and the Kyogoku)--all tangled with court politics and familial feuds and all that good stuff. It's a complicated picture, but if you think you need a scorecard then you're lucky, for Carter provides those in the form of genealogy charts in the back (along with a handy list of all the imperial poetry compilations and the story behind them). It must be said that the format of the book itself is a bit unhandy, for the English translations for poems by a particular poet are given one after the other, and then only afterwards are the original Japanese texts provided (in romanji)--having these both on the same page where they can be compared at a glance without flipping pages around is the usual practice and now I see why. The translations themselves though are carefully accurate and quite scholarly though nicely poetic for the most part whenever this doesn't interfere with said accuracy. And in the later poems one can detect traces, the barest hints, of the values and aesthetics of those later poetic forms that would eventually eclip