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.

The home page for each collection presents a link to an introduction for that particular work, and then a table of contents. Each of the volumes of the collection has two different links, one to the original Japanese text, and one to an annotated translation.

Japanese text

The Japanese text link presents essentially a straight transcription of the base text, with only a few changes:

• Variant kana and kanji forms are changed to standard modern forms
• Some punctuation is added to the prose sections (no periods are used, only commas)
• Voicing marks (dakuten) are added

The page numbers given are based on the file numbers in the Catalogue scan, not the page numbers of the original woodblock.

In addition to the text, two sets of notes are given. The first is variant readings from other texts. The individual introduction to each collection will list the texts and their abbreviations. The presentation of the variants is like this:

• やまざくら] さくらばな（元・清）

This means that where the base text reads やまざくら, the two texts identified by 元 and 清 read さくらばな instead. If an identifier is in bold, that means it is a text used by modern editions.