Man’yōshū (Book 16)

Book sixteen of the Man’yōshū (‘Anthology of Myriad Leaves’) continues Alexander Vovin’s new English translation of this 20-volume work originally compiled between c.759 and 785 AD. It is the earliest Japanese poetic anthology in existence and thus the most important compendium of Japanese culture of the Asuka and Nara periods. Book sixteen is the tenth volume of the Man’yōshū to be published to date (following books fifteen (2009), five (2011), fourteen (2012), twenty (2013), seventeen (2016), eighteen (2016), one (2017), nineteen (2018), and two (2020). Each volume of the Vovin translation contains the original text, kana transliteration, romanization, glossing and commentary.

Alexander Vovin, currently Directeur d’études in Japanese and Inner Asian historical linguistics, an elected member of the Academia Europaea and a Laureate of 2015 prize of Japan’s National Institute for Humanities (Centre des recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie orientale), has published extensively on Japanese, Ainu, Korean, Mongolian and Tungusic, as well as other languages of East and Inner Asia. Among his major works are A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu (Brill, 1993), A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), Nihongo Keitōron no Genzai/Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese Language (co-edited with Osada Toshiki, the International Center for Japanese Studies, Kyōto, 2003), Koreo-Japonica (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese, vol. 1-2 (Global Oriental 2005, 2009, second edition Brill 2020), and a multivolume edition and translation of the Man’yōshū, the first and the largest Japanese poetical anthology (Global Oriental/Brill, 2009). Most recently he has deciphered (together with Dieter Maue) two Mongolian inscriptions that predate the other extant Mongolian texts by at least 600 years (Journal Asiatique 306.2 and 307.1 (2018-19), The International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 1.1 (2019)).