[The Roof Rat Review.]
Anonymous, H. Jay Harris (trans). The Tales of Ise. Tuttle Publishing, 1972 (伊勢物語, 1900). I think this must be the despair of translators. Even the short prose passages seem to imply the difficulty of poetry.
The Roof Rat Review
- Gerald Murnane. Inland. (1989). A lovely X-ray of provincial childhood, wrapped in metafictional padding to which I was often indifferent but that sometimes carried off the magic trick as intended.
- Anna Burns. Milkman. Faber & Faber, 2018. An awful delight.
- Arakida Moritake, Steven D. Carter (trans). Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology. Stanford University Press, 1993 (1991). Meticulously done. Reading in concert with a literary history like Keene's is a good way to avoid the false sense of sameness that comes with the heft.
- Donald Keene. World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Premodern Era - 1600-1867 (A History of Japanese Literature - Volume 2). Columbia University Press, 1999 (World Within Walls, 1976). Literary history through a reflecting telescope: genres cohere and then hollow out, what moves are possible when.
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