MANYOSHU - TADA, Saishi.

£500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Romazigaki Man'yosyu ("The Manyoshu Transcribed"). Presentation copy of a later edition, inscribed by the author on the front pastedown "To Mrs P. E. Goodman, With the compliments of the transcriber & annotator. Tada-Saisi [sic]". This is an early transcription into the Latin alphabet of the Man'yoshu, Japan's oldest and most revered poetry anthology.The Man'yoshu ("Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves") was compiled in approximately 759 AD. It was read throughout Japanese history, but the great boom in Man'yoshu studies came after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. It was particularly popular in the lead-up to the Second World War, where its rustic values and connection to the imperial family were praised.Tada Saishi was a poetry and linguistics scholar who published an early translation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He wrote in his postface to this volume (in Japanese) that "recently... there has been a wealth of research into the Man'yoshu. However those studies put kanji into kana and discuss the meanings of the vocabulary; it is very rare to find one that focuses on assigning punctuation or splitting up words correctly. For example, should the final line of poem 88 be rendered 'Waga Koi yaman' or 'Wa ga koi-yaman'? They do not explain" (p. 178). He wrote this volume to definitively transcribe the text, with some minor annotations, and allow for future research into the early Japanese language.

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