Gosenshu Introduction

[NOTE: This introduction is incomplete and fragmentary; it's still a working draft with major parts not yet complete.]

The Gosen wakashu (GSS) is the second imperially commissioned anthology of Japanese poetry. It has long suffered in comparison with its predecessor, the Kokin wakashu (KKS), which quickly became the foundation of proper poetry.

Japanese poetry prior to the Gosenshu

The best English source for the early history of Japanese poetry is Helen McCullough's Brocade by Night (Stanford, 1985). The content of this section draws heavily from her account and in some sense is a summary of her book.

Heian court poetry draws primarily from two sources. The first is native Japanese song, which seems to have organized itself around alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables in pre-written times. We can see vestiges of this pre-written song in the Fudoki (provincial gazeteers), the Kojiki, the Man'yoshu, and possibly even the Kokinshu. However, some of these surviving poems may be revisions and refinements of the older songs based on later court taste.

The second source is Chinese poetry, which was introduced to Japan in the 6th or 7th centuries. By this time, Chinese poetry had been refined over millennia, and the Japanese would have had access to such diverse poetry as the early Book of Songs, the early CE Six Dynasties writing, and the contemporaneous Tang poetry. From the Chinese tradition they derived some of their poetic techniques, such as mitate -- a "feigned confusion" where the poet pretends to see snow as plum blossoms, or the white wave caps as cherry blossoms. They also absorbed the importance of the "public poem", a poem composed on a set topic for an official event or gathering. This lent a certain prestige to the native Japanese song that had been lacking.

The earliest anthology of poetry by Japanese is the Kaifuso, which is actually an anthology of Chinese poetry. At the same time, Japanese poetry was developing, culminating in the Man'yoshu, an anthology of some 4500 poems. The poems are almost entirely tanka, 31 syllable poems of 5-7-5-7-7, but a significant minority are longer choka, which alternate 5-7 lines for as long as the poet wants until they end in a 7-7 couplet. The best remembered authors in this collection are Kakimoto no Hitomaro, Yamabe no Akahito, and Okura no Yakamochi. Yakamochi may be the one who was responsible for the MYS' final form.

The MYS poems contain some older folk songs, but much of the poetry is public, showing that Japanese poetry had gained some level of prestige. We find poems in the MYS composed on set topics, at official banquets, by Emperors, and to Emperors. But it seems that in the 8th and 9th centuries the Japanese poem lost some of its luster. The next three anthologies produced in Japan are all of Chinese poetry. McCullough calls this the "dark age of the public waka", and divides the period up into three parts, leading up to the Kokinshu (p 172):

• 759-842, a period which has almost no poetry by named authors. Modern scholars believe that much of the anonymous poetry in the first three Imperial collections comes from this period, and that the ko (old) in Kokinshu refers primarily to this poetry.
• 842-884, where we find poetry by named authors such as Ono no Komachi and Ariwara no Narihira, but no Imperial sponsorship.
• 884-913, when Japanese poetry returns to public life. This is the period of the KKS' compilers' poetry, and contains the earliest poetic competitions.

The GSS also draws from all three periods.

The Kokinshu was compiled in the early 10th century. In its roughly 1100 poems divided into 20 books, it laid down the foundation for court poetry for the next 500 years. The collection was devoted almost entirely to "public" poetry, with almost no private exchanges. Even the five love volumes consisted almost entirely of no context poems expressing the feelings related to love rather than poems sent to lovers. The twenty volumes of the poems began with 8 seasonal volumes, then celebration, parting, travel, and "names of things". Five love volumes and two miscellaneous poems follow. The last two volumes are a hodgepodge -- volume 19 is non-tanka poetry and comic haikai poetry, and volume 20 is songs associated with the Bureau of Songs as well as "Eastern" poems.

The Composition of the Gosenshu

We know frustratingly little about the circumstances surrounding the GSS' compilation. The collection itself has no preface, and all the sources of information about it date much later than the collection itself. Honcho monzui, a large collection of Chinese poetry and prose dating to the mid-11th century, says that in 951, Emperor Murakami charged five men to compile a new poetry collection and to gloss the text of the Man'yoshu. But neither this (nor any other contemporary source) say anything about when the work was completed, or when it was presented to the Emperor.

Nevertheless, it is clear from sources such as the Tale of Genji and the Tale of Flowering Fortunes that by the first decade of the 11th century, the GSS was established as one of the three imperial collections alongside the KKS and the Shui wakashu. This does not zero in on a completion date for the GSS, but it does show that it was recognized early on as having an official status equal to the KKS.

The Text of the Gosenshu

As the previous discussion makes clear, there can be no urtext of the GSS since we don't even know when or if it was completed.

The base text

The text used for this translation is in the hand of Fujiwara no Teika 藤原定家, written in 1234 at the age of 73, the second to last manuscript of the GSS he made. For many years this text was only known through copies, including a tracing done in the Edo period. But in 2004 a facsimile edition of the original, held in the Reizei family archives, was finally published. We know of nine different Teika texts of the GSS, ranging from 1221 to 1236, as well as undated copies. But the 1234 manuscript (the Tenpuku 2 天福二 text) has been the standard text of the GSS since the 14th century.

As with Teika's other manuscripts, the text contains annotations (勘物); primarily about the authors, but a few notes about variant readings. The character 万 also appears on a handful of poems that are also found in the Man'yoshu, and there are a few other notes on poems that are duplicated in the KKS or elsewhere in the GSS itself. In addition, there are a good number of variant readings recorded in red ink. According to the colophon by Teika, these are the result of a collation with a text purportedly in the hand of Fujiwara no Yukinari. Teika evidently valued this information highly, and in the last manuscript he made in his life he incorporated many of them into his text.

Types of poems

I define three major types of poems in the GSS, taking the information from the prose preface at face value:

1 Occasional poems are composed in response to some external stimuli. For instance, a poet sees a cherry blossom and reads a poem. Or, a group of men are passing around a wine cup and composing poems about the spring night. These poems can either be composed by the poet in isolation, or in front of others.

2 Artificial poems are composed on a set topic. This includes poems for poetry competitions, screen paintings, poetic sequences, or those in response to Imperial command. I also include in this category prose prefaces such as 花をよめる ("read on flowers") -- while this could be occasional, there are many prefaces that read as 花を見てよめる ("The poet saw flowers and read this"). I don't think we can say with certainty that the original compilers saw a significant difference between these two types of prefaces, but it's possible that they did.

3 Personal poems are addressed to one person. Often these are called "private" poems but many of them were composed with the knowledge (or even hope) that they would be read by others. The bulk of these personal poems are love poems, but there are poems of friendship, apology, or thanks as well.

In addition to these three types, there are the poems with unknown contexts (題知らず). These poems may be any of the three types. Sometimes we can make educated guesses that they may have been screen poems, or poems composed on topics, but we have no certainty. In other cases these "unknown context" poems can be found in other sources with contexts given. In some cases it seems clear that a context was added to what was originally a no context poem, but since the dating of all these sources is uncertain, it's dangerous to try to draw firm conclusions.

The notes

The notes and comment appearing in the body of the text are meant to analyze the poem as it appears in the base text. This includes identifying poetic techniques (such as plays on words), analyzing the overall meaning, judging the poem's quality, examining the poetic imagery, explaining its place in the larger collection, and identifying other poems from previous or contemporary collections that are similar in meaning. The main commentary only mentions textual issues or appearances in other sources in very select cases, where these matters can help illuminate the basic meaning of the poem in the GSS. Furthermore, any emendations to the base text are mentioned in the main notes.

The supplementary notes are for other type of information that is either more specialized, or analyzes the poem outside of its appearance in the GSS. This includes textual variants, appearances of the poem in other collections, selections of the poem for 秀歌撰, allusions in the Tale of Genji or other works, later poems drawing on the poem for honka-dori, and comments in old poetic manuals or commentaries. The 勘物 (annotations) in the text by Teika himself will also be collected here.