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from: Vintage
List Price: $14.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.6114080354
EAN: 9780679729587
ISBN: 0679729585
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: October 03, 1990
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: October 03, 1990
Sales Rank: 60921
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
These translated poems were written by 2 ladies of the Heian court of Japan between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D. The poems speak intimately of their authors' sexual longing, fulfillment and disillusionment.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - The Ink Dark Moon
A lovely book. Translations from another culture and time that we can still relate to. A pleasure to read and reread.
Rating: - A Classic for All Time
The Heian period of Japan was artistically fertile time that produced numerous classic works of literature. It was even more remarkable in that most of the major literary figures of the time were women. Among those great women, Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu were two of the best. Their waka poetry (now called 'tanka') is some of the best literature ever written in Japan and the poetesses themselves have become the stuff of legend.
Doing justice in translating ancient Japanese into ... Read More
Rating: - Beautiful and universal
Unlike other reviewers, I am not an aficionado of Japanese poetry or culture, nor have I ever studied this period in Japanese history. I found this book entirely by chance buried in an obscure corner in my college library. I read a couple of random pages and fell in love. I checked it out repeatedly throughout my academic career, then bought it.
These women so effectively communicate, in few words, universal feelings of love. While the poems are deceptively simple, they manage to ... Read More
Rating: - Love and Nature
Wonderful poems showing the power and of two woman poets of the Heian Jidai. Exposes the "nature" poetry prejudice that derives from the unfortunately all male cutesy pie abbreviations of Westernized haiku. Waka yes, Haiku no.
Rating:  - Love poems from the Heian era.
Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani have done a marvelous job with the translation of these lovely tanka-- manages to capture both their fragility and robust complexity. I had an acquaintance who was a scholar with a focus on Japanese literature. She explained to me a little bit about the complexity of translating waka. I have nothing but admiration for those who can do it well. Hirshfield actually has an essay at the back of this book called "On Japanese Poetry and the Process of Translation". I recommend ... Read More
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