Shinkokinshū (2 vols)

The Shinkokinshū: A New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (ca. 1205) is supreme among the twenty-one anthologies of court poetry ordered by the Japanese emperors between the tenth and fifteenth centuries in terms of overall literary art, the high quality of the almost two thousand poems included, and the depth of poetic sentiment. Laurel Rasplica Rodd's complete translation allows the reader to appreciate the elaborate integration of the anthologized poems into a single whole by means of chronological procession or imagistic association from one poem to the next that was perfected in the Shinkokinshū by Retired Emperor Gotoba, himself a serious poet, and the courtiers he appointed as compilers, including Fujiwara no Teika, one of the greatest of Japanese poets.

Laurel Rasplica Rodd, Ph.D (1977) University of Michigan, is Professor of Japanese at the University of Colorado. She has published monographs, articles and translations of Japanese literature, including Kokinshū: A New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Princeton UP, 1984).

"It is a work any serious Japan studies library will need to have on its shelves and a work waka specialists will use for reference, read for study, read for pleasure, and use for teaching. It may even form a foundation on which research and discussion of the contribution of waka to world
poetry can be built and enhance collaboration between Japan studies specialists and scholars working in other fi elds. It will rightly take a place in
the constellation of great translations of waka poetry."
T. E. McAuley, University of Sheffield, Journal of Japanese Studies 43:2 (2017)