POETRY

Happily, the strictures of formality still left room for another mode of communication, one outside the domain of hierarchically marked language. This was poetry, then considered the noblest of all the arts. In poetry people could address each other from the heart. Many early anecdotes tell how an eloquent poem by someone of very low rank, addressed to a superior, gained the person recognition as a fellow human being. All of Japan's early literature includes poems (prose fiction may have first crystallized around them), and The Tale of Genji contains 795. Readers down the centuries have often valued them even above the prose.

In the world evoked by the tale it was possible to speak or write a poem for oneself, but poetry was first of all a matter of social necessity. Courting required an exchange of poems, as did many other moments in life, and someone distinctly inept at it was socially disadvantaged. People learned to write by copying poems, they acquired the language of poetry by memorizing a great many examples, and they confirmed what they knew by composing more themselves. Although many poems in the tale are spoken or written spontaneously, their spontaneity actually reflects a mastery of complex rules of diction, vocabulary, and form. Some poems achieved great heights of poignancy, passion, elegance, or wit. Among the characters in The Tale of Genji, the "best poet" is said to be the lady from Akashi.

The poems in question are called tanka ("short song"), waka ("Japanese song"), or simply uta ("song"). Each consists of five subunits of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, for a total of thirty-one. Tanka are usually written in one unbroken line. They have no rhyme, which would be too easy and too low in variety to be interesting, and no meter, since the language does not lend itself to that either. Their character as poetry arises from a range of sophisticated devices, including wordplay, that make most of them extremely difficult to translate.

The poems in this book follow the tanka's syllabic form and are divided into two centered lines, one of 5-7-5 syllables and the other of 7-7. Syllabic count is, of course, not natural as a form in English, but it sets the language of the poems off appropriately from that of the prose. Observing it often requires more words in translation than the polysyllabic original readily supplies, but the result suits poems integrated into a prose narrative. However, the poems quoted in the notes do not follow this form, being translated for basic meaning only. The ones without author attribution are anonymous.