Paper short abstract:

Edo era Sinitic poets attended to prosody, tonality, rhyme, and other features associated with aurality. Yet such aspects of a poem were usually inaudible in the dominant form of oral performance: interpretive recitation by kundoku. How did Japanese Sinitic poets grapple with this central issue?

Paper long abstract:

Sound is fundamental to most definitions of poetry, a mode of expression often distinguished by the combined emphasis it places upon both sound and sense. But what about poetry written in a language by those who do not speak it? Like their counterparts elsewhere in the Sinosphere, composers of Sinitic poetry in early modern Japan were keenly attentive to prosodic rules, tonality, rhyme, and other features conventionally associated with aurality. Yet such aspects of a poem were usually inaudible in the dominant form of oral performance practiced in Japan at the time: interpretive recitation aloud by kundoku. This paper examines the diverse ways in which early modern Japanese theorists and practitioners of Sinitic poetry grappled with this central issue. It draws predominantly on a range of writings in the “shiwa” genre of “talks on poetry,” including treatises specifically addressing the aural features of Sinitic poetry, such as Akazawa Ichidō’s (1796–1847) “Shiritsu” (1833) as well as “Shayū shiritsu ron” (contents assembled ca. 1820–1832; published 1883), a collection of correspondence focused on the question of the sound of Sinitic poetry that poet Ono Senzō (1767–1832) solicited from contemporary luminaries beginning with his teacher Rai San’yō (1780–1832), and including the interventions of Umetsuji Shunshō (1776–1857), Shinozaki Shōchiku (1781-1851) and several others. It also looks at another type of shiwa, lexicons explicating obscure Sinitic poetic vocabulary such as Katsugen shiwa (1787, 1804), compiled by the Tendai priest and celebrated Sinitic poet Rikunyo (1734–1801), and Suiuken shiwa (1862) by Yamada Suiu (1815–1875), to shed further light on how late Edo Sinitic poets conceived of the sound of Sinitic . Finally, the paper asks what these writings tell us about how early modern Japanese poets conceived of the linguistic status of Sinitic texts. The paper shows that even as these diversely inclined Sinitic poets and scholars advanced a variety of contradictory positions on such questions as the advisability of learning spoken Chinese, the primacy of Chinese aesthetic judgments, or the relevance of contemporary Chinese pronunciation to questions of tonal prosody, they shared a fundamental recognition of the linguistic alterity of Sinitic to Japanese.