A Gap in the Clouds
James Hadley and Nell Regan (Translators)
The Dedalus Press: 2021
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The Ogura Hyakunin Isshu is a corpus of 100 short lyrics written by 100 different poets across four centuries, compiled in about 1285 by Fujirawa no Teika and with a legendary status in Japanese culture. A Gap in the Clouds is the latest attempt to render these tanka into English. There are formidable problems in translating Japanese poetry, not least its canonical texts, even without entering the hermeneutic theory of what we’ve learned to call ‘cultural alterity’.
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- Tags: Issue 24, James Hadley, Japan, Michael Freeman, Nell Regan, Ogura