This is tangential, Hat, but -- what kind of sophistication did Western poetry acquire after the Conquest, when? I don't think our poetry's ever gotten more sophisticated than it is in Sappho's or Ovid's verse. Or, for that matter, (in its kind) Old English and Old Norse verse. Unless sophisticated means something I'm not clued into here...?

Arthur Waley's "The Uta" (perhaps really called,, according to Google, "The Utah") has more poems of the genre, plus a sketch grammar. Add Sansom's "Historical Grammar of Japanese" or a more specialized grammar, Rexroth's collection, and Miner's collection, and you can rather quickly go rather far in the appreciation of these poems.

dale: Good point; I think we can chalk it up to typical enthusiastic overstatement on the part of a partisan of some neglected genre or period.

Zizka: "The Utah"? I love it.

Okay, I'm mollified :-)

You're right, these are amazing poems! Thank you for the link.

An additional fact of interest about these poems is that they form the basis for a game known as karuta in which the players must match the first half of the poem, displayed on a card, with the second. It is traditional to play this game at New Year's. There is a televised national tournament.

As a follow-up to Bill's comment, karuta is not only a traditional new year's game, but a game that high school students spend days studying for in preparation for the tournaments held in every school's gym.. It's a rowdy game--two teams of three students each face off with 100 cards containing I think the first three lines & last 2 of 100 famous tanka. Another person, chosen for his or her chanting voice reads out the beginning of the poem I think--not sure--the first two or three syllables of each tanka in the karuta game are different, in all the 50 poems... so this means traditionally, court ladies and well-heeled women of the pre-louis-vuitton-handbag-era were said to be so well-versed (bad pun) in karuta that hearing the first two syllables of a poem was enough for them to identify the poem...

Apologies for late night possible incomprehensibility! I found a fantastic website on the history of karuta a few months ago and can't even imagine where/how I discovered it, now that I'm looking!

That's fascinating! If you do find the website, please link to it here; I'd like to see it.

Actually, in karuta, the entire poem is read out. The actual karuta cards that players compete to grab only feature the last half of the poem. Furthermore, the cards are written entirely in hiragana, which can make it difficult to visually distinguish between cards with different poems. It is a very large advantage to know all the poems by heart - but not essential for play. The basic skill required is still recognize the hiragana script - something even elementary school students can do.

There is an article on wikipedia about the game with a detailed explanation.

I also forgot to add that a better page exists with the original japanese text, a romanisation, and translation of the hyakunin-isshu, along with some information about the card game.

Hyakunin Isshu

Wow, thanks -- that's a great site!

> I found a fantastic website on the history of karuta a few months ago and can't even imagine where/how I discovered it, now that I'm looking!

Maybe http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~xs3d-bull/essays/karuta/karuta.html is the page?

That's a fantastic piece, Dave -- thanks for the link, and I'm going to give it its own post.