Paper short abstract:

The Man'yōshū was originally written entirely with Chinese characters, and the text can be understood as a hybrid of speech and picture. The talk examines the problems of kaki-kudashi, the rewriting of the original text into a composition written in hiragana phonograms and Chinese characters.

Paper long abstract:

The poem anthology Man'yōshū was originally written entirely with Chinese characters, but even at the beginning of the tenth century—and presumably before—the mixture of logograms and several types of phonograms was no more comprehensible than it had been in the original. For this reason, Murakami Tennō ordered a 'translation' into contemporary Japanese. The process of rewriting the original text by using hiragana phonograms, which is known as kaki-kudashi and is still ongoing, was also the beginning of poem interpretation and Man'yōshū philology. These developments were extremely crucial for Japanese cultural preservation because the anthology would not have survived without the readability of the text. Of course, there have been adverse effects, too, such as the equation of Man'yōshū poems with waka. However, it is significant that the poems are perceived as a part of the so-called phonographic dogma, i.e., reading the poems merely as a representation of speech.

The first part of the talk addresses notational iconicity, i.e., the pictorialization of writing or the hybrid of speech and picture. The aim is to reveal how meaning is lost in transliteration with hiragana phonograms (kaki-kudashi). This loss for the reading eye alone is problematic enough, but reading only the kaki-kudashi text and not taking the original text into account may also result in misunderstandings. I will explain these problems by a look at contemporary research and with some convincing examples from the anthology.