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Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image
by Joshua S. Mostow
This
book provides, for the first time in English, the kind of information
that allows an accurate appreciation of the meanings and quality of
Japanese poems.... Mostow's reception-oriented approach in this
poem-by-poem discussion inspires an excellent essay on the history of
English translations of this collection. --ChoiceThe Hyakunin Isshu, or One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, collection is a sequence of one hundred Japanese poems in the tanka four, selected by the famous poet and scholar Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) and arranged, in part, to represent the history of Japanese poetry from the seventh century down to Teika's own day. The anthology is, without doubt, the most popular and widely known collection of poetry in Japan -- a distinction it has maintained for hundreds of years. In this study, Joshua Mostow challenges the idea of a final or authoritative reading of the Hyakunin Isshu and presents a refreshing, persuasive case for a reception history of this seminal work.
Following a concise explanation of the basic rhetoric of Japanese poetry, Mostow examines the Hyakunin Isshu in its varying historical contexts, both at the time of its compilation -- as part of the tradition of exemplary anthologies in Japanese poetry and within the context of Teika's poetics and aesthetic criteria -- and in its subsequent history as the source of a rich and often contradictory tradition of commentary and exegesis.
By making the exegetical tradition the object of his analysis, Mostow shows how successive centuries of Japanese readers understood and appropriated the past and placed themselves in relation to it. The history of the English translation of the Hyakunin Isshu is also treated as part of the history of its reception. ...
In addition to providing a new translation of this classic text and biographical information on each poet, Mostow examines issues relating to text and image that are central to the Japanese arts from the Heian into the early modern period.
By using Edo-period woodblock illustrations as pictorializations of the poems -- as pictures of the heart -- or meaning, of the poems, text and image are pieced together in a holistic approach that will stand as a model for further research in the interrelationship between Japanese visual and verbal art...
CONDITION: Hard Cover with DJ, NEW, with light wear to DJ from shelving only, 640 pages, published May 1996
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