Page:Anthology of Japanese Literature.pdf/25

21 in its inspiration. This is the “,” or “Fond Recollections of Poetry,” an anthology of poetry written in Chinese by members of the Japanese court. It was to be expected that Japanese poets writing in Chinese should have adhered closely to Chinese models, and some of the verses of the “Kaifūsō” are no more like original Chinese poems than Latin verses written by schoolboys today are like Horace. Why, it may be wondered, did Japanese choose to write poetry in a foreign language which few of them could actually speak? The answer is to be found partly in the prestige lent by an ability to write poetry in the difficult classical Chinese language, but partly also in the Japanese belief that there were things which could not be expressed within their own poetic forms. This was less true in the age of the “Man’yōshū,” when the poets enjoyed greater liberty than was to be known again in Japan for more than a thousand years, but even from the seventh century there are examples of parallel poems written in Japanese and Chinese which show what the poets thought to be the essential differences between the two mediums. The following were both written by Prince Ōtsu (662–687) shortly before his execution:

The former poem, from the “Man’yōshū,” is purely Japanese in feeling; the latter, from the “Kaifūsō,” not only uses Chinese language and allusions but attempts to give philosophic overtones lacking in the simple Japanese verse. This distinction between the content of poetry written in Japanese and in Chinese became of increasingly great importance. In the Muromachi Period, for example, Zen priests