Audiobook · read by volunteers
One Hundred Verses from Old Japan
Teika no Fujiwara (1162–1241)
Read by Kevin Steinbach · 11 chapters · 49 min
About the book
In thirteenth-century Japan, a poet and scholar chose one hundred poems by one hundred poets and set them side by side. The result, known as the Hyakunin Isshu, is still learned, recited and played with in Japan today. In 1909 William N. Porter brought the whole collection into English, presented ten poems at a time. Every poem is a single breath: a moonlit sleeve, a long autumn night, a love that cannot be spoken, the slow ebb of a season. Together they trace the feelings that courtiers of long ago shared and that we still recognise. At under an hour, this recording is easy to enjoy in a single sitting, and it rewards a second listening, when the images begin to ring against one another. Each poem is a world in miniature.
Introduction
Fujiwara no Teika, also known as Sadaie, lived from 1162 to 1241, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and was a well-regarded poet in a society that prized poetry. At one point in his life he compiled the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, usually shortened to the Hyakunin Isshu, a collection whose name means roughly “a hundred people, one poem each.” The anthology became so familiar in Japan that it is known to almost everyone there, and it has shaped the way generations have thought about classical verse.
The English version recorded here is the work of William N. Porter, who lived from 1849 to 1929 and published his translation in 1909 under the title One Hundred Verses from Old Japan. It opens with an introduction and then presents the poems in ten groups of ten, in their traditional order, so that the whole anthology unfolds in eleven short parts. The total running time is under an hour.
The poems themselves are very brief, and their subjects are those of court poetry: the changing seasons, the moon, longing and the pain of parting, the passing of youth. Readers and listeners who come to them for the first time are often struck by how much feeling can be held in a handful of syllables.
The recording was made by LibriVox volunteers, who give their time so that these texts can be heard freely. It is a gentle way to meet one of the foundations of Japanese literature, and a good book to return to whenever you want something small, quiet and exact.
Public domain
Teika no Fujiwara died in 1241: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text