The Ten Thousand Leaves Poems from the Man'yoshu

by Levy, Ian Hideo

• ISBN13: 9781681378909
• ISBN10: 1681378906
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781681378916
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-05-20
• Publisher: NYRB Poets
• More Book Details

Summary

A sweeping anthology of classical Japanese poetry, including poems about love, war, trees and mountains, everyday life, and so much more. One of the most important works of Japanese literature of all time, available here in an accessible translation.

Winner of the 1982 American Book Award for Translation

The first and greatest anthology of classical Japanese poetry, the Man'yōshū is considered, along with The Tale of Genji, to be one the most important works in classical Japanese literature. In Japanese the title means “Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves,” the “anthology of anthologies” from the first flowering of an artistic and literary sensibility in Japan during the Asuka and Nara periods—the seventh and eighth centuries. Exhibiting an astonishing variety, the poems range from the grand animistic rhetoric of the laments for the imperial family to the stark and curiously modern “Dialogue of the Destitute,” from the elegant banquet verse of aristocrats to the “poems of the frontier guardsmen.” As its name suggests, The Ten Thousand Leaves represents a culling of what was considered the best from an epoch of cultural and literary innovation perhaps unparalleled in Japanese history.

This edition incorporates books one through five of the twenty that make up the original Man'yōshū and includes an introduction by the translator, Ian Hideo Levy, that provides a general historical and cultural background for this monumental work.

Author Biography

Ian Hideo Levy is a Japanese-language author who is one of the first Americans to write modern literature in Japanese. He was born in Berkeley, California to a Polish mother and Jewish father and moved between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States during his childhood. At Princeton, he studied the Man’yōshū and graduated with a degree in East Asian Studies. After teaching at both Princeton and Stanford, Levy moved to Tokyo and became the first foreigner to win the Noma Literary Award for New Writer. He was awarded the 2007 Japan Foundation Special Prize for introducing Japanese literature to a foreign audience and won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature in 2017.