This volume's scale of achievement is in direct proportion to the significance of the text it translates. The Shinkokinshū (c. 1205) is one of the two most important imperial anthologies (chokusenshū) of all time. Twenty-one chokusenshū of Japanese poetry in the waka (thirty-one- syllable) form were compiled over a period of five centuries and each one was an event of immense political as well as literary consequence. The key role the Shinkokinshū in solidifying a new style in waka poetry has been outlined by many scholars publishing in English, most notably by Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner in their foundational volume, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford University Press, 1961). All anthologies of translations of pre-modern Japanese literature contain large selections from the Shinkokinshū and monographs have been devoted to several prominent poets of the anthology, Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), Saigyō (1118-1190) and Princess Shokushi (Shikishi) (1152-1201). Robert Huey's masterful The Making of the Shinkokinshū (Harvard University Press, 2002) gives a comprehensive account of the exceedingly complicated political and literary tensions that shaped the anthology's compilation. But what we have not had so far is a complete translation of the anthology itself into English. The reason is not hard to divine; with a total of 1979 poems, its translation is a daunting task. In fact, Laurel Rodd has worked on this translation for more than three decades, clearly a labour of service and love.

Translation as a scholarly enterprise has been devalued in recent decades but its importance for cross-cultural communication remains as essential as ever. Moreover, a complete translation provides insights and benefits that excerpted translations cannot. This reviewer has been studying classical Japanese for five decades and if I were to devote sufficient time and effort to it, I could read the whole of the Shinkokinshū in the original, but never with the speed and the immediacy with which I read my mother tongue. This translation gives me the feeling of reading the anthology as I imagine it was read by its original compilers and audience, that is, being able to recognise new original voices, take delight in the associative and integrative patterns into which the poems are woven and appreciate how a theme or topic is explored through variation as the anthology unfolds. One could argue that this sense of immediacy is an illusion but it is a vital illusion for the transmission of texts within the evolving constellation of “world literature”.

Laurel Rodd came uniquely prepared for this task having devoted a substantial part of her earlier scholarly career to translating the Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Princeton University Press, 1984), the first of the two most important chokusenshū. As the similarity between the two titles attests, the Shinkokinshū compilers were well aware that they were attempting to emulate that first great compilation, which established in the tenth century the very notion of a waka canon in the Japanese literary tradition. That the new style of waka in the Shinkokinshū had deep neo-classical roots is also evidenced by one of its favourite poetic practices, honka dori “allusive variation”, that is, taking phrases and whole lines of a canonised poem from the past, most often from the Kokinshū, and creating a new poem with a very different conception. With the advantage of already having translated the Kokinshū in its entirety, Rodd was able to use her own translations for the more than three hundred and forty Kokinshū poems that have allusive variations in the Shinkokinshū. In a reader friendly manner, whenever a Shinkokinshū poem involves allusive variation, its honka “foundation poem” is given immediately under it for comparison. A quick survey of books in Japanese culture and comparative studies reveals that most citations of Kokinshū poems are given in Rodd's translation. I believe Rodd's translations of the Kokinshū have become the standard translations because they have a unique musicality in tune with contemporary poetry. She has further refined this successful translation style in this new work.

Rodd's waka translation style is based on the simple principle of maintaining the five-line format and thirty-one syllable length of the waka form. She herself notes the danger that this “may lead to padding in English, as well as to enjambments not part of the original poems” but she defends it on the grounds that not maintaining a single form for the nearly two thousand poems would lead to “flabbiness and a loss of tension” (p. ix). I find that her skill as a translator enables her to always amplify nuances present in the original rather than pad, and that the enjambments slow down the reading in a way that is entirely in keeping with the complexity of the original poems. Take this poem no. 258 by Jien (1155-1255) as an example:

Note that the final seven-syllable verb in the original katabukinikeru could simply be translated as “set”, yet that would elide the wealth of suggested time and movement embedded in the verb's polyphony. Rodd's “slid over the horizon” captures it perfectly. In this case, the enjambment between lines four and five is in the original, but the extended space in the formatting before “the moon” creates a pause in reading that gives more emphasis to the moon as topic. This is appropriate because this poem happens to be an allusive variation on the Kokinshū poem no. 404 by Ki no Tsurayuki (ca. 972-945):

While recycling key elements from the Tsurayuki honka, Jien has produced a more striking poem by transposing the scene to night and freighting the imagery with an ambiguous symbolism. Is the poet an aesthete, so captivated by the beauty of the moon's reflection that he forgets to drink, or is he a person seeking the truth of Buddhism, so often symbolised by the moon, but finding that he shatters it in the very act of attempting to grasp it? Both interpretations are tenable and there is no need to choose. The differences between Jien's poem and its honka reveal much about how poetic sensibility had changed in the age of the Shinkokinshū while still retaining so much of the legacy of the past.

From the two examples above, one might also note in passing, that Rodd's decision to keep punctuation to an absolute minimum and let the rhythm of the words in the lines deliver the poem's sense contributes to the contemporary feel of her translations. Since classical Japanese verse had no punctuation at all, it makes her translations more literal as well.

One aspect of the Shinkokinshū that has garnered admiration over the centuries is the subtlety of its orchestration. It is organised into twenty “books”, nine of which are devoted to the seasons and love, very similar to the Kokinshū. Within the books, the seasonal poems generally follow a progression in imagery from early to late, and the love poems follow the conventional narrative for courtly love from suffering in secret, to meeting, and eventually parting. In the other books, poems are grouped by topics and theme. However, what makes the ordering of poems in the Shinkokinshū special is the way that the placement of poems often produces a hyper meaning in the space between poems. An extended example is the only way to demonstrate this. The following three poems from the first of the two books on “autumn” are probably the most frequently cited of all the poems in the Shinkokinshū because they are regarded as the quintessential expression of the new aesthetic mood of the medieval era, sabi, which Earl Miner et al in the Princeton Companion to Classical Literature (1985) have defined as “the desolation and beauty of loneliness”. Autumn dusk came to be associated with this mood and it must be remembered that the people of the age were witnessing the waning twilight of courtly aristocratic culture. I mentioned above that some insights are available only with a complete translation. This was one instance for me. When this trio of poems appeared, I realised that it was the original compilers themselves who had recognised the unity of these three poems and how well they expressed the new aesthetic ideal. Two of the poets, Jakuren (1139?-1202) and Fujiwara no Teika were themselves members of the compilation committee, and the third poet Saigyō has the distinction of having the largest number of poems in the anthology. Let us look at the three poems before further comment.

All three poems begin with abstract musing leading to an implied question: “if sabishisa “sadness” has no form, how do we know it”, “what stirs this feeling of melancholy in a monk who is nominally beyond the pull of emotions”, “with nothing of conventional beauty in the scene before me, what moves me”. And in each case, the answer is given with a concrete image coloured in the monochrome of autumn dusk. Together, they represent a manifesto of the Shinkokinshū style both in structure and tone.

With the sequencing having reached this crescendo, however, the following poem in the anthology goes in a completely different direction:

This poem is also by one of the Shinkokinshū compilers, Fujiwara no Masatsune (1170-1221) and to appreciate the fact that it injects almost a note of humour into this litany of autumn evening sadness, one needs to be aware of its honka, a poem from the Ise monogatari, “Tales of Ise”:

The honka expresses the time-honoured theme of “all you need is love” and with his allusive variation, Masatane pokes fun at that cliché. At the same time, its placement in this sequence gently teases his fellow compilers for their evocation of beauty in such plainly cold and uncomfortable landscapes. My reading here issues from an awareness of linking practices in renga “linked verse”, the form that came to dominate later medieval poetry production. But then the orchestration of the Shinkokinshū is itself often cited as a primary influence on the development of linked verse. Implicit in that linking practice is the insight that unrelieved profundity begs for its opposite, that a moment of lightened mood is necessary to keep the heart open. It is almost as though Masatane's poem is used primarily to set up the last poem in this “autumn evening” sequence, which is by a lesser known woman poet, Kunaikyō (?1185-?2005).

The stark expression of an abstract emotion divorced from a specific situation or the mirror of nature is another of the new directions taken by medieval poetry. This poem by Kunaikyō is a brilliant example of it. Rodd's word choice of “interrogate” here with its connotations of torture is so appropriate here for this timeless expression of a state of depression in which it is self-torture to seek a reason for the sadness. Note too, however, since the sequencing of the Shinkokinshū is our main subject here, how this poem harks back to Jakuren's poem that started the series, “no form evokes sorrow”. This is what I would term the Shinkokinshū shuffle, three steps forward, a step aside, a step both forward and back to the beginning again. Following the sustained quality of linking and back-linking in this anthology is an engaging experience.

Before leaving Kunaikyō behind, I must remark that she is only one of several lesser known women poets who stand out when this anthology is read as a whole. They register as new and vital voices even though the total number of their poems is relatively small. Often, as here, the compilers seem to have made an effort to foreground their poems by the way they are fitted into the sequencing. Huey translates a significant passage from the memoirs of Minamoto no Ienaga (1173?-1234), which gives a detailed account of the efforts of Emperor Go-Toba, the sponsor of the anthology, to find and encourage younger women poets in order to expand the range of poetry available for selection into the new anthology (Huey, 67–68). What is remarkable, however, is that the freshness of their voices is apparent just from reading the anthology in translation.

Rodd has provided this translation with a concise but thorough introduction to the Shinkokinshū’s social and political context, the complexities of its textual history and the essentials of its style. She points out secondary works in English that will allow the reader to pursue these topics in more depth. The work is rounded out with an author index accompanied by brief biographies for each poet, a comprehensive list of the classical texts referenced, an index of first lines in Romanised Japanese, a bibliography of modern primary and secondary texts, and finally an index for the introduction. In short, the volume has everything one would need for classroom use. The only problem is that this volume is too expensive ever to be used as a textbook, or indeed to become part of a beginning student's library. Everyone in the field of Japanese literature will be grateful that Brill has published such a careful and elegant edition of this important and masterfully translated text, but one can only hope that at some point in the future, some other press may be granted the rights to bring out a more affordable edition.