- Convenors:
-
Dario Minguzzi
(Sapienza University of Rome)
Gustav Heldt (University of Virginia)
Marjorie Burge (University of Colorado Boulder)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Arthur Defrance
(INALCO)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Pre-modern Literature
Short Abstract
This panel focuses on the potential for providing a more complex understanding of early Japanese literary history offered by eighth-century texts that were composed by culturally cosmopolitan poets in both literary Sinitic and vernacular Japanese.
Long Abstract
For such a comparatively small corpus, eighth-century poetry offers a remarkably varied picture of the East Asian “cosmopolis,” a term used to refer to the transpolitical and transcultural forms of community created in the first millennium CE through the circulation of such prestige languages as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Literary Sinitic. Many vernacular literary forms—those forms which utilized local/non-prestige languages—also began to take shape at this time through a symbiotic relationship with their cosmopolitan counterparts. In eighth-century Northeast Asia, this flourishing of poetic practice appears in a historical context characterized by shifting alliances within and between multiple polities that produced a complex and dynamic set of power relationships. Therefore, within this remarkable corpus, of particular interest are the biographies of individual poets who moved between different cultural contexts, thereby fostering their facility at the rhetorical negotiation of multiple demands with maximum diplomacy. However, this picture is invariably complicated by an anthologizing process that removed their poems from the compositional contexts of the banquets that often shaped their rhetoric.
Drawing on a diverse array of anthologies—Man'yōshū (Collection for a Myriad Ages), Kaifūsō (Verses Recollecting Old Customs, 751), Keikokushū (Collection for Binding the Realm, 827), Kokinshū (Collection of Poems Old and New, 905), and Wenyuan yinghua (Literary Garden of Splendid Blossoms, ca. 1204)—our panel will approach this complex literary terrain by focusing on cosmopolitan poets whose communities were not limited to Japan. How does the poetry of a foreign visitor figure in Japanese literary history? What about the cosmopolitan and vernacular literary legacies of poets whose parents migrated to Japan, or that of a poet who spent his entire adult life outside it? How can these poems contribute to histories that extend our understanding of early Japan into the ninth century? This panel aims to provide a more expansive picture of the period by asking such questions of its most cosmopolitan poets.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper foregrounds the significance of Parhae poetry in Japan by examining the surviving Sinitic poems of Yang T’aesa, Parhae envoy to Nara in 758-59, at the intersection of their original historical context and their early Heian recontextualizations.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the surviving poems in literary Sinitic attributed to Yang T’aesa (?-?), vice-ambassador of the Parhae kingdom (698–926) during the fourth embassy to Nara in 758-59. Eighth-century historiographical sources record that Yang participated in a poetic exchange at a farewell banquet hosted by the powerful statesman Fujiwara no Nakamaro (706-764), though these compositions are no longer extant. What survives are two poems preserved in the early ninth-century imperially sponsored anthology Keikokushū (Collection for Binding the Realm, 827), likely composed in different circumstances and subsequently recontextualized within an emerging early Heian imperial poetic canon. Yang T’aesa’s embassy coincided with a pivotal post-An Lushan juncture in East Asia, when Parhae played an increasingly significant role in mediating people, texts, and knowledge between the Nara court and the continent. From the late eighth century onward, such transregional connections contributed decisively to the political and cultural consolidation of the new imperial line and to the formation of a distinct early Heian literary elite. Rather than treating Yang T’aesa’s poems solely as records of diplomatic encounter, this paper situates them at the intersection of their original historical context in late Nara and their later poetic recontextualization within the early Heian imperial archive. Through the case of Yang T’aesa’s poetry, this paper traces the earliest recorded stage of Parhae’s poetic channel in Japan and foregrounds its entrenchment with the transformation of poetic literacy, training, and performance from the Nara to the early Heian period.
Paper short abstract
This paper identifies links between poetic and political ambiguities in farewell shi exchanged between Nakamaro and his Tang palace colleagues that mark both historical breaks and continuities with his famed waka poem
Paper long abstract
In both his historical and textual lives, Abe no Nakamaro (698-770) has come to embody linguistic, cultural, and political forms of hybrid identity. Although the image of him today largely revolves around his waka poem and the narratives surrounding it, however, the earlier relationship of Nakamaro’s shi poetry to the formation of his textual identity remains largely unexplored. As a way of addressing this deficit, my paper observes how he positions himself in one such poem he composed as part of a farewell exchange with three palace colleagues, one of whom was the celebrated Tang-dynasty poet Wang Wei (699-761), that has been preserved in the anthology Wenyuan yinghua (Literary Garden of Splendid Blossoms, ca. 1204). While the Tang empire welcomed Nakamaro into the heart of its cultural and political life, his colleagues in this exchange cannot envisage Japan within even the outermost mythical borders of the world they imagined in poetry. These discursive boundaries are most powerfully demonstrated at their limits through the spatially ambiguous language Nakamaro resorts to in marking both Japan and his dual political identity. Spatial ambiguity also distinguishes the farewell poem by Wang Wei, who makes a punning reference to a Japanese toponym that can be read as a tacit expression of appreciation for his friend’s diplomatic maneuvers. The preference for diplomatically ambiguous spaces characterizing this poetic gathering also resonates with the waka Nakamaro is first associated with a century later, at a time when the Sinocentric discursive and political order in Northeast Asia was being replaced by a more multipolar one. In this fluid new setting, politically liminal spaces are now poetically presented by blending the vocabulary of waka with that of shi.
Paper short abstract
This paper considers the poetic legacies of three toraijin poets who were likely the sons of men of Paekche who fled the aftermath of the Battle of the Paek River of 663 and have poems in both Literary Sinitic and in Old Japanese in Kaifūsō (751) and Man’yoshū (ca. 780s).
Paper long abstract
This paper considers the poetic legacies of three toraijin poets of first half of the eighth century: Asada no Yasu (fl.720s-740s), Tori no Senryō (fl.710s-720s), and Kichi no Yoroshi (fl.700s-730s). All three poets were likely the sons of men of Paekche (ca. late third century-660CE) who fled the aftermath of the Battle of the Paek River of 663, and all three have works preserved in both Literary Sinitic and in Old Japanese in Kaifūsō (751) and Man’yoshū (ca. 780s). While very little information is available about their lives and careers, it is apparent from their extant compositions that they were not only educated in the Chinese classics, but that they also cultivated their skills in Japanese poetry as part of their official careers. Through an exploration of the poetic artifacts attributable to these three men, this paper argues that poetry in both modes was a means of fostering social ties with superiors, especially those men with a taste for literature such as Prince Nagaya (676-729) and Ōtomo no Tabito (665-731). The poetry of all three poets, in both Literary Sinitic and Japanese, is thus distinguished by its focus on the lord-vassal relationship; however, each man’s poetic voice is distinctive and consistent across languages and forms. In considering these relatively unknown and minimally-represented poets, this paper also takes up the question of the role of descendants of peninsular refugees in the literary culture that developed in eighth-century Japan.