Ovid has has his ups and downs -- down in the late classical and early middle ages, up in the high middle age and renaissance, down again in the neo-classical and 19th centuries, up again in the 20th. I had the impression that Sei has also had ups and downs, if not as many. Certainly her star is high now -- if a westerner knows a second classical Japanese work (after Genji), it's tPB.
I like Catullus, but Horace more, but Ovid uber alles fur mich. (Dang that looks weird without umlauts-I-can't-type.)
Brocade by Night has been very useful for me at teasing out the layers of history jumbled together in the Kokinshu, and has helped me get a better handle on evaluating style in these poems. Useful enough, I squealed when I received a copy for a solstice gift this week. There's probably more recent scholarship on various aspects of the court style, but as far as I'm aware this is the only comprehensive treatment in English of the styles and their influences. It probably helps if you've already read the anthology and have a moderate grounding in pre-T'ang Chinese poetry, but McCullough does include extensive translations.
(tl;dr: I'm no scholar, but as a poet and would-be translator, it's a gold mine.)
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regna
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Date: 2010-12-24 01:26 (UTC)I like Catullus, but Horace more, but Ovid uber alles fur mich. (Dang that looks weird without umlauts-I-can't-type.)
Brocade by Night has been very useful for me at teasing out the layers of history jumbled together in the Kokinshu, and has helped me get a better handle on evaluating style in these poems. Useful enough, I squealed when I received a copy for a solstice gift this week. There's probably more recent scholarship on various aspects of the court style, but as far as I'm aware this is the only comprehensive treatment in English of the styles and their influences. It probably helps if you've already read the anthology and have a moderate grounding in pre-T'ang Chinese poetry, but McCullough does include extensive translations.
(tl;dr: I'm no scholar, but as a poet and would-be translator, it's a gold mine.)
---L.