And we are back to the imperial poetry anthologies. This one, 金葉和歌集 “Poetry Collection of Golden Leaves,” is from the early twelfth century and I am indebted to one of my undergraduate professors, Stephen D. Miller, for turning me on to it. I think he’s translated some of these poems as well in his day. The ones I’ve selected generally have a Buddhist focus or in some cases an autumnal or wintry seasonal focus, which is aspirational given the weather we have been having where I am. There is one summer poem, though.

Ki no Tomonori (850-904) and Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945), the cousinly dynamic duo behind the Kokin Wakashū or Kokinshū (古今和歌集, “Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems,” the first of the Imperial Poetry Anthologies), were no strangers to brutally hot and humid summer weather. These men lived in Kyoto, where I have been in July and where you could not pay me to go in July again. In the Kokinshū they have many seasonal poems attributing to summer imagery a certain cruelty and brutality; often these poems are about cicadas, symbols of both summer and impermanence. In the interests of making Classical Japanese poetry timely and relevant to those of us who are beginning to experience summer as a somewhat apocalyptic time, I have translated all ten of these cicada poems.

This waka (the “most traditional” Japanese poetic form—the 5-7-5 familiar from haiku, followed by two more lines of seven morae each) is the work of the twelfth-century monk-poet Saigyō. It appears in the seventeenth volume of 1205's Shin Kokin Wakashū (新古今和歌集, “New Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems”), the eighth of the twenty-one Imperial Poetry Anthologies, whose intermediate points in the sequence is reflected in its modifier-heavy title. The doves in the poem make me think of this as something of a “Pentecost special,” especially since there is plenty of explicitly Pentecost-themed literature, such as Eliot's “Four Quartets” or O'Connor's “The Enduring Chill,” with just as morose a style and tone.

Many of Saigyō's poems, as with those of his later emulator Bashō, are unmediated descriptions of experiences he had traveling around Japan. In perhaps no other literature is the travelogue as august a literary form. Japan mastered it as early and as thoroughly as Occitania mastered the lyric poem or England the novel.