The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu [Hardcover]

Phillip Harries (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Japanese (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (June 1, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804710775
• ISBN-13: 978-0804710770
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,697,292 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but a minor work, June 30, 2004

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wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu (Hardcover)

The Heian period in Japan is known for its flowering of women's writing. Lady Daibu was part of that efflorescence. In fact, among all of the memoirs that have lasted the millenium since that era, Daibu's work is distinctive for two reasons. First, it gives us a larger dose of poetry than other memoirs do.

More importantly, Lady Daibu's active period covers the end of the Heian era, the downfall of the Taira. It is almost maddening that women, by custom, wrote only about their direct experiences and emotional responses. 'Tales of the Heike' report that defining period in military and political terms. Daibu, instead, reports the loss of her Taira lover and the upwelling of feeling on seeing the foundation of his burned house. Her view from the court could have been so much more, but comes across as shallow and self-involved.

This memoir really is just a report of her emotional responses, generally in the form of five-line poems. Many aspects of this form were difficult for me to take in fully. For one thing, the poems often allude to other poems, famous in Heian times but now obscure. For another, dense, poetic writing often relied on 'pivot' words. Because of the language's structure, Japanese has many groups of words that have similar or identical sounds - puns, but used as a literary device for carrying multiple meanings. Of course, these can not be rendered into English except through ponderous footnotes. The forms of the ideographs also allow visual puns between words of similar written form, another subtlety that fails in translation. Although the translator provides copious notes, I felt as if I were watching some movie and had to have every joke explained to me.

As noted, this memoir starts before and ends after the events defining the end of the Heian period. Those events also define eras in Daibu's life: the Taira fell, and her Taira lover fell with the rest of the clan. From that point forward, her mood became uniformly bleak, maybe even clinically depressed.

Although interesting for its historical context, I don't get a lot of insight into Heian times from this work. The translation is a fine piece of scholarship. The annotations are plentiful and helpful, if sometimes dry. I give this four stars for competent rendering into modern English, but almost gave less for the weak content put into it by the original author.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, if a little hard to follow at times., November 1, 2002

By 

"eponymous_one" (Springfield, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu (Hardcover)

I found it a little hard to follow, with the book alternating between blank-verse poetry and prose sections. Another thing that didn't help it was the seventy-seven-page introduction and the fifteen pages of syntax on the collection and collation of the works that make it up at the end. Overall, it was decent, and some of the poems were indeed touching, which bump it up that much more. Without that, I'd give it no more than three stars. But with it, it's a four-star book.