General introduction

This wiki presents annotated translations of poems from the first three chokusen wakashū (poems compiled by Imperial order). Mediawiki features are used to provide links to similar poems, other poems by the same authors, images from the Mediawiki Commons, and other such elements.

The base text for the translations is a 1647 woodblock printed edition of all 21 Imperial collections, usually called the 正保四年版本 in Japanese scholarship. There are two primary reasons for this choice.

The first page of Kokin wakashū

First, high quality scans in the public domain are available from multiple sources through the Union Catalogue Database of Japanese Texts. Thus there are no copyright issues involved in reproducing either the text or images of it, and the original can be easily checked by anyone.

Second, the text found in this woodblock print is essentially the standard text of the collections from the Edo period up until quite recently. This edition was the base text for the widely used Kokka taikan, which was only replaced with a newer edition in the 1980s. Thus much of the existing scholarship is based on this textual form.

In addition, scholars have been increasingly wary of identifying specific texts that are supposedly more authoritative or reliable than others, and assigning more weight to those texts that were actually used throughout time.