Man?y?sh? (Book 20): A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary

by Brill

Overview

Book twenty (20.4293-4516) of the Man’yōshū comprises 224 poems (218 tanka, six chōka) with unspecified genres. From the social point of view this book is the most varied one, as it includes poems from empresses and princes, various strata of the nobility, down to the lowest border guard soldiers. Organized chronologically, book twenty is important for two important reasons. First, it contains many poems written in Eastern Old Japanese. Second, given the fact that many authors of the poems written in Western Old Japanese are well known historical and political figures of the mid-eighth century, it provides an interesting literary background to political struggles that were taking place at this time at the Nara court.

Following book twenty the publication sequence will be as follows: book seventeen, book eighteen, book nineteen, book one, book nine, and then starting from book two in numerical order. A full rationale for the publication sequence can be found in book fifteen.

Each volume of this new translation contains the original text, kana transliteration, romanization, glossing and commentary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789004261983
Publisher:	Brill Academic Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/15/2013
Series:	Man'yōshū , #20
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	8.70(w) x 12.20(h) x 1.70(d)

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).