The jousting of languages : The Collection of Chinese and Japanese Poems Worth Reciting (Wa-kan rôei shû) (^11th century)

This year's lecture was devoted to a text that could not escape our survey of the philology of Japanese civilization. This is certainly a well-known work in the history of Japanese literature, of which there are almost a dozen easily accessible modern commented editions, at least two of which have been published in paperback collections, giving us an idea, if not of its popularity, (We've even seen a former novelist, now a controversial politician, publish his own anthology of 205 quotations from Wakan rôei-shû, intended to be read aloud, in the most trivial sense of the title). This current diffusion is not a novelty: we can say that the Wakan rôei-shû, since it is the work on which we have focused, has always been widely read and studied since its publication, at the very beginning of the ^11th century, around the year 1013, thus contemporary with the greatest literary texts of the Heian period, and particularly the Genji-monogatari. The reasons for its popularity in pre-modern Japan are probably those most often mentioned: this collection is a veritable poetic compendium, a light encyclopedia of the most famous Chinese poets and Chinese-style Japanese poets, as well as an anthology of Japanese poetic anthologies. Those who own it, who know the main parts by heart, acquire a veneer of culture that will enable them to shine in society. At least, that's one of the uses posterity has found for this book. It certainly wasn't the author's original intention, which, as we'll see, was probably aesthetic. That, at least, is the immediate cause of this compilation. It does not explain the arrangement of the poems, nor that of the themes. That's where we need to look for an overall intention, a coherent purpose that presides over the structure of the collection. The compiler didn't spell it out, but it's natural for us to look for it, to try to bring it to light and explain it. We are fortunate enough to have several prefaces to this work, all of them very much later in date, written by different authors, but which share a number of points in common, enabling us perhaps to identify other preoccupations, among those who took a close interest in the collection, than those which brought most readers to this book, namely purely literary, cultural and even pedagogical interest.