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Abstract:

The classic unrhymed form of Japanese tanka (“short song”) poetry is over 1500 years old; the prosodic unit of tanka is the stanza, consisting of a group of 5 and 7 mora, the poem itself consists of five syllabic groups of 5–7 and 5–7–7 syllables. Tanka is developed as impromptu oral poetry in ritual practice, at poetry tournaments at the imperial court, at rural festivals, then, in the 8thcentury was recorded in the first written poetic monument “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves” (Man’yōshū). In ancient times, the authors of tanka were court poets, emperors, aristocrats, Buddhist monks, Shinto priests and farmers, fishermen, warriors. Tanka themes and tropes are strictly canonized and represent a fusion of natural images and human feelings, which in the context of the genre plays important role, being intelligible to the traditional reader and incomprehensible to a foreigner. The high degree of homonymy of the Japanese language makes it possible to develop a complex game of meanings. During the Meiji era (1868–1912), when the country opened up to Western influences after nearly 300 years of isolation, it seemed that traditional forms of poetry and prose would leave the literary scene, giving way to the“poetry of new form”(shintaishi) and European prose forms — novel and short story. However, the ancient poetics possessed plasticity, which allowed it to perceive new trends and organically weave them into an established and seemingly unshakable canon. Using the tanka poems by the famous poetess Yosano Akiko (1878– 1942) as an example, we will look at how the process of merging canonical topics that existed for centuries with a new worldview took place.

Keywords: Japanese classical tradition, literary text, poetics, tanka, Meiji era, Yosano Akiko, “Tangled Hair”.