Paper short abstract:

This talk examines the various roles of Chinese characters and glossing practices in interpreting and mediating between different types of poetic language within the eclectic context of medieval commentaries on the Japanese and Chinese-style Chanting Collection (Wakan rōeishū, early 11th c).

Paper long abstract:

As new patterns of literary education took shape from the twelfth century onward, the Japanese and Chinese-style Chanting Collection (Wakan rōeishū, early 11th c.), an encyclopedic anthology containing both waka poetry and couplets from Chinese-style sources, became a focal point for poetic study. Medieval commentaries on this anthology brought together an array of approaches to explaining lines of poetry - including vernacular glossing and paraphrase, composite and contradictory citations, anecdotal storytelling, and allegoresis - into a complex interpretive space that played an important role in the organization and transmission of literary knowledge. Most early commentaries focused on the Chinese-style material in the collection, but this talk begins with an exception: the Wakan rōeishū wadanshō (1405), which included a separate set of annotations on the waka poetry. Although it is framed as a record of spoken discussion about the text, this commentary makes frequent use of 'visual' glosses that interpret the vocabulary of waka poetry in terms of how it should be written in Chinese characters, suggesting the importance of gloss-based reading and writing in introductory education and in curating a network of links between different types of poetic language. On the one hand, annotations of this type can be related to a concern throughout this commentary with the written forms of characters, their potential for visual puns and hidden meanings, and the symbolic power of historical anecdotes about character decryption; on the other, they can also be situated within a broader context of character-based 'visual' glosses in poetics texts and dictionaries. In both senses, this work provides a starting point to consider the role of written characters in constructing meaning within the particular cross-genre context of medieval commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū, a realm of interpretation with implications for many other areas of literary culture.