Synopsis
Book fourteen of the Man’yōshῡ (‘Anthology of Myriad Leaves’) continues Alexander Vovin’s new English translation of this 20-volume major work which was compiled between c.759 and 782 AD, making it the earliest and largest Japanese poetic anthology in existence and thus the most important compendium of Japanese culture of the Asuka and Nara periods.
Book fourteen is the third volume of the Man’yōshῡ to be published to date (following books fifteen (2009) and five (2011)) and contains 230 tanka poems, together with a few significant variants, bringing the total to 249.
This volume will be followed by publication of book twenty (2013) (instead of the previously announced book seventeen) on account of the fact that book twenty also contains many poems by Border Guards written in the same Eastern Old Japanese (EOJ) as do many of the Azuma-period poems that are contained in book fourteen.
Each volume of this new translation contains the original text, kana transliteration, romanization, glossing and commentary.
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).
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