The Tosa diary / (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "A. D. 935..." (more)
Key Phrases: New Year, Day of the Rat, Government House (more...)

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Product Description

Written with artless simplicity and quiet humor, The Tosa Diary is the story of a fifty-five day journey by ship from Tosa to Kyoto in AD 935. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English, Japanese --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 148 pages
• Publisher: Classic Books (January 1976)
• ISBN-10: 0742641481
• ISBN-13: 978-0742641488
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Are We There Yet?, August 10, 2006

By	Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Tosa Diary (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature) (Paperback)

You know, there's always some level of hype about the "latest translation" and all, but this wonderful translation of "The Tosa Diary" by William Porter, originally published in 1912, demonstrates that we are not always so much more clever than those who came before. Porter is carefully faithful to the sense of the original while capturing its tone and mood in English with great talent. And his method of rendering the waka poems scattered throughout the story is inventive and interesting--though sometimes understandably a bit strained; he has taken the original and fashioned it into something that is true both to waka poetics and to the English poetics of his time (before T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and all that jazz), with a rhyming couplet at the end corresponding to the way the last two lines of a waka break off from the first three thereby completing the poem with a flourish. Compare his rendering of a poem by Ariwara Narihira with Helen McCullough's more conservatively literal (though not inferior) rendering, and you'll get a sense of Porter's distinctiveness here:

Porter: "If the cherry trees/Nevermore burst forth in bloom,/'Twould be better far;/For the saddest time of all/Is the spring, when petals fall."

McCullough: "If this were but a world/To which cherry blossoms/Were quite foreign,/Then perhaps in spring/Our hearts would know peace."

As for the story itself, it is a fairly interesting early attempt at prose narrative, though it is pretty uneventful and kind of drags in spots (one almost wishes the much-feared pirates had actually caught up with Tsurayuki's boat). The thing I found most significant about the tale, though, was the manner in which Ki no Tsurayuki here fleshes out in narrative form the principle he elucidates in the first paragraph of his preface to the "Kokinshu" waka anthology, i.e. poetry being the expression of people's emotional reactions to their experiences and sensual perceptions. Here we see that principle in action all along this otherwise rather tedious trip back to the Capital. Certainly, such moments were Tsurayuki's primary focus and interest, not "Pirates of the Inland Sea" per se.

This book also has the original Japanese text on one side with the English translation on the other, so it is really handy for students of Japanese literature.