“Japanese poetry has the human heart as seed and myriads of
words as leaves. It comes into being when men use the seen and the heard to
give voice to feelings aroused by the innumerable events in their lives”
(Tsurayuki 3).
I don’t usually include long quotes in this newsletter but I
really love this quote and think about it often as I reflect on reading this
text. It is not often the case that when I pull a work a name off the Small
Works list that someone I know has intimate knowledge of their work. I know
someone through a friend who grew up in Japan, and interacted with Ki No
Tsurayuki in their education in high school. I have still connect at a deeper
level about this work but they pointed me in the right direction with this
author, and I set out to read some of the
Kokin Wakashu which Tsurayuki was
responsible for compiling. In addition to beginning the work of compiling all
of the requisite Japanese poetry at the time, in the ‘waka’ style of poetry,
Tsurayuki also wrote the preface to that ancient document, and included 100 of
his own poems in the collection. 20 volumes follow this first collection which
I suppose collects the breadth of the Japanese poetic endeavor.
**A Wistful Caveat** Starting in the 900s, this makes me
wistful for what might have been able to be collected in the English language
but the British were not as careful with the records or the preservation of
texts. Doubtless, poets lived and breathed on the British Isles throughout
history, a bard wandering from town to town making his money with the art of
song and storytelling but all of those ‘texts’ are lost to history. We don’t
get story telling written in the native tongue until Chaucer and there is a
great misfortune of history perhaps here. I don’t mean to be Anglocentric here,
but this is my first and only language and I am grateful for the world history,
art, and stories we do have from all of the cultures that persist until today,
it is just something that struck me while reading Tsurayuki.
In addition to reading a good deal of the Kokin Wakashu, I
also read the Tosa Diary which Tsurayuki wrote about a sea journey he took at
some point in his life. The edition of Kokin that I had also included the Tosa
Diary but called it Tosa Nikki and so I wasn’t sure if that was the same thing,
turns out it was but I read the Tosa Diary in a book that was published in
1912, translated by William Porter which was fantastic, and perhaps easier on
the eyes than the official text in the anthology that I read. The Tosa Diary
records the travels of Tsurayuki after he has heard of his youngest daughter’s
death back at the capital, Kyoto. He travels back in order to be with his
family, I think I got that right. It is touching and a delightful read. I could
imagine this text being a movie told in flashbacks.
The work recorded in
Kokin Wakashu takes some getting used
to. These are short documents, 31 syllables long. Many have some cultural
touchpoint that I do not have access to. I spent a reflective morning at a
local coffee shop listening to Mono (Japan) and googling Plum Blossoms and
certain mountains in Japan and had a real thing going on. It was delightful. I
have inserted one here that I have written delicately on a piece of paper and folded
and placed at a grave of someone who was dear to me.
“If this were a world
In which there were no such thing
As false promises,
How great would be my delight
As I listened to your words” (Tsurayuki 5).
There is another poem that I will caste into a plaque and
set by a tree that was planted by this person as well. That one was is now
sacred to me. I loved reading these poems, and found myself enthralled in this
work.
Here are two more poems because I thought they were nice:
371 Composed at a farewell party
I mourn your absence
Even as we say farewell
How then might I feel
After you have journeyed forth
To lands beyond the white clouds?
381 Written in parting
This experience
Men refer to as parting
Is not a color.
Why then must it torture us
By soaking into our hearts?
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