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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.