Secret Island and the Enticing Flame, The: Worlds of Memory, Discovery, and Loss in Japanese Poetry

Edwin A. CRANSTON

The three “essays” in this book draw on the translator’s work on love poetry - classical waka and the tanka of Yosano Akiko (1878-1942)- but also introduce the prose poems and free verse of a contemporary surrealist poet, Mizuno Ruriko, whose themes are childhood and the loss of innocence. The Secret Island and the Enticing Flame: Worlds of Memory, Discovery, and Loss shows the translator of poetry experimenting with three different ways to present the results of his craft. “In the Dark of the Year” is an essay in sequencing. Cranston arranges translations of fifty love poems in the tanka form, ranging from the ancient chronicle Kojiki to the contemporary poet Tawara Machi, in an examination of desire, melancholy, and despair. The arrangement, inspired by the technique of association and progression, suggests an ongoing love story and limns the essence of the classical love tradition. “Young Akiko: the Literary Debut of Yosano Akiko (1878-1942)” adopts a biographical approach. Richly documented with the astonishing tanka of the young poet who burst on the literary scene in 1900, this essay updates the author’s article originally published in 1977 in Literature East and West. Finally, the longest essay, “The Dark at the Bottom of the Dish: Fishing for Myth in the Poetry of Mizuno Ruriko,” shows Cranston “working outside his usual box,” on the poems of a contemporary surrealist whose deepest themes are childhood and loss of innocence. Mizuno, hitherto not well known outside Japan, is a master of the prose poem and free verse. Cranston’s essay shows the translator searching for the mysterious power that draws him to a poetry quite different from any on which he has previously worked.
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Teishinkōki: Year 939 in the Journal of Regent Fujiwara no Tadahira

Joan R. PIGGOTT & Sanae YOSHIDA

This book is organized around a fully annotated translation of daily entries from the year 939 in the Teishinkoki, the journal of Fujiwara Tadahira, an early regent. The translation makes entries from a courtier journal accessible to English readers for the first time. The finished work provides startling insights into the Heian court led by Tadahira during the 930s and 940s, when the regency took established form even as it met challenges from regional rebellions in eastern and western Japan. Note: This book reads from right to left. It is not in error, please do not return your order.
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Max Loehr and the Study of Chinese Bronzes: Style and Classification in the History of Art

Robert BAGLEY

Max Loehr (1903–1988), the most distinguished historian of Chinese art of his generation, is celebrated above all for a 1953 art historical study of Chinese bronzes that effectively predicted discoveries Chinese archaeologists were about to make. Those discoveries in turn overthrew the theories of Loehr’s great rival Bernhard Karlgren (1889-1978), a Swedish sinologue whose apparently scientific use of classification and statistics had long dominated Western studies of the bronzes. Revisiting a controversy that was ended by archaeology before the issues at stake were fully understood, Robert Bagley shows its methodological implications to be profound. Starting with a close reading of the work of Karlgren, he uses an analogy with biological taxonomy to clarify questions of method and to distinguish between science and the appearance of science. Then, turning to Loehr, he provides the rationale for an art history that is concerned above all with constructing a meaningful history of creative events, one that sees the intentionality of designers and patrons as the driving force behind stylistic change. In a concluding chapter he analyzes the concept of style, arguing that many classic confusions in art historical theorizing arise from a failure to recognize that style is not a property of objects. Addressed not just to ancient China specialists or historians of Chinese art, this book uses Loehr’s work on bronzes as a case study for exploring central issues of art history. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with the analysis of visual materials.
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