Since the publication of volume 15 in 2009, Alexander Vovin has published annotated translations of seven of the twenty volumes of the Man'yōshū. After completing volumes 5, 14, 20, 17, and 18, he has now turned to volume 1. Given that this volume has been studied more exhaustively than any other in the anthology, it is impressive that it “proved to be a relatively swift process”, as we learn from the acknowledgements.

Each poem is presented in six sections, including an “Original text” (a printed kanji text), a “Kana transliteration”, a “Romanization”, a “Glossing with morphemic analysis”, a “Translation”, and a “Commentary”, in which Vovin discusses what for him are the most interesting issues with each poem.

Vovin is clearly familiar with the manuscript history of the Man'yōshū, and he provides a comprehensive list of its commentaries in the bibliography. However, the volume would have benefited greatly from consulting some of the outstanding Man'yōshū studies published in recent decades. The bibliography includes only a small handful of Man'yō scholars born after 1940 and if I am not mistaken none who are under the age of 65. Moreover, I could not find a single citation in the bibliography of the main venues in which Man'yōshū scholars publish: the journals Man'yō, Jōdai bungaku, etc. The book thus feels curiously disconnected from Japanese scholarship as practised for the last forty years.

The same could be said for recent English-language scholarship and translations. Vovin mentions my own work briefly in the introduction to say he disagrees with my term “imperial imagination”, but there are no references to the work of Edwin Cranston or Mack Horton, both of whom have translated many of the poems from volume 1. An example of Vovin's disengagement from other Man'yōshū scholarship is his commentary to 1.45, in which he wonders why Prince Karu is described as if he were the sovereign in the poem and yet is referred to simply as “Prince Karu” in the headnote. Vovin speculates that the compilers may have been suggesting that Emperor Monmu (Karu's name after accession) was illegitimate, and concludes “the historians of Asuka and Nara periods probably can find an answer to this puzzle”. Given that this is one of Hitomaro's most famous poems, there are many people who have discussed why Prince Karu is described in the same terms as a sovereign. I discuss this question in my book, and cite several scholars (all absent from Vovin's bibliography) who have touched on the issue, including Watase Masatada, Ueno Osamu, Mori Asao, Misaki Hisashi, Tōyama Ichirō, Kōnoshi Takamitsu, and Murata Migifumi. There is broad consensus that the poem depicts the young Prince Karu as a sovereign in order to portray him as a worthy heir to his grandfather Tenmu. The reason he is described as “Prince Karu” in the headnote is simply because he was still prince at the time of the events described in the poem.

While it is understandable that as a linguist Vovin would be primarily interested in linguistic issues, he appears to give little thought to the contexts of language. Indeed some of his translations suggest that he is providing word-for-word glosses without really thinking about the overall meaning of the poems. One example of this is his translation of the opening lines of Hitomaro's poem “On passing the ruined capital at Ōmi (1. 29), in which he renders the phrase 神之盡 (kami ₂ no₂ ko₂to₂go₂to₂) as “the divine matters”. It is quite clear from both the graph 盡 itself and the context that the phrase means “every single one of the gods”. This is just one example, but it is symptomatic of a fundamental problem with this book: Vovin, detailed though he is in his treatment of certain issues, does not pay enough attention to the meanings of words as they are shaped by the contexts in which they appear.

Even in places where one would expect Vovin to be in his element, there are still puzzling errors. For instance, in the section of the introduction in which he provides a chart of “Man'yōgana phonographic signs used in the Man'yōshū”, right at the beginning under あ, we find the graph for metal (金) with the reading aki ₁ listed as a “disyllabic kungana” (phonographs whose sounds are based on Japanese readings). As exemplified in poem 1.7, 金 can indeed be read as aki ₁ (with the meaning “autumn”), but this is not a phonographic reading at all. It is a logographic reading based on the association between metal and autumn in five elements theory. Even more puzzling is the fact that the graph 金 is used as a disyllabic kungana in the Man'yōshū in over thirty instances with the pronunciation of kane, yet this is missing from Vovin's chart.

At the same time, Vovin is quite bold in proposing radical revisions of glosses that go against centuries of previous scholarship. One example of this is his argument that the pillow-word 八隅知之, which always appears modifying the phrase waga opoki ₁mi₁ (“our/my great lord”), has been glossed incorrectly as yasumi ₁sisi and misinterpreted by every single commentator and scholar since the thirteenth century. I do not have the space to outline the multiple problems with Vovin's argument here, but suffice it to say that there are good reasons why this gloss has not changed in 800 years. Vovin also asserts that yasumi ₁sisi is “applicable only to emperors, and not to princes”, but there are several examples of the term being used to describe princes in volumes 2 and 3 of the Man'yōshū.

To conclude, there are many things that Vovin gets right (particularly when he follows Japanese commentaries closely). It is unfortunate that the book is marred by numerous errors and by a lack of engagement with other Man'yōshū scholarship. One hopes that Vovin's future translations of the remaining volumes of the anthology will address the shortcomings of this one.