The Kokinshū was always meant to become a classic. The ambition of its compilers was to make waka (vernacular Japanese poetry) the preeminent literary practice of the Japanese imperial court. Yet surely even they would have been surprised by the extent of their success. From shortly after its completion to the end of the nineteenth century, the Kokinshū was the cornerstone for the waka tradition. It provided normative models for poetry composition and for the compilation of another twenty imperial anthologies. It was foundational for later forms of vernacular poetry such as linked verse and haikai (which would develop into the modern haiku). And it played a central role in the vernacular prose literary writing that developed from poetry collections and commentary. The Kokinshū’s enduring status is attested by the more than three hundred commentaries produced from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. This vast exegetical tradition led in turn to many of its poems becoming the source material for all kinds of other literary forms, including Nō theater and late medieval popular fiction.

Appropriately for such an important text, there are several existing English renditions of the Kokinshū, including two complete translations. Many of these are excellent. What led me to attempt a different approach was the realization that existing translations were focused on crafting individual translations of each poem. I wanted to translate the common language shared by the poems in the anthology.

An important part of the appeal of the Kokinshū is that it was purposefully created to be an ideal object of exegesis. Many poems in the collection revel in ambiguity—of syntax, meaning, tone—and seem designed to challenge the reader to make sense of them. The organization of the Kokinshū adds to this challenge. In part because they are so brief, waka poems do not really convey meaning as self-contained artifacts but rather in dialogue with other poems written on similar topics. How one understands each individual poem will greatly depend on the degree of one’s familiarity with other poems. Moreover, the Kokinshū anthology encourages readers to interpret its poems in relation to each other by organizing them into sequences of themes. Any given poem often appears to be echoing, responding to, or even contradicting an earlier composition. In a nutshell, the Kokinshū is not so much the sum of its individual poems, but rather the poetic text created by the relationships between poems. It is this larger poetic text that my translation attempts to render in English.

To recreate the sense of poems speaking to each other, I needed all my translations to sound and feel like they were in a standard form. This meant creating a common rhythmic signature across the translations. Previous attempts to do this focused on replicating the purely syllabic prosody of the original Japanese text. To my ear at least, these attempts are not very successful, since the syllable by itself is not a unit of rhythm in English. Even if two different English translations both follow the waka five-line pattern in 5/7/5/7/7 syllables, they can sound very different rhythmically depending on how many stressed or unstressed English syllables they use per line. Instead, I created a form that transposed the classical Japanese pattern of 5–7 syllable combinations into a loose iambic pentameter pattern of 4/6 or 4/7 syllables. This results in the poems sharing a common rhythmic signature that has a more natural feel in English while approximating the original Japanese form. For instance, this is poem #205, from the first volume of “Autumn” poems in the Kokinshū: