Tanka

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Tanka

 

an ancient genre of Japanese poetry. The tanka is a graceful unrhymed five-line poem consisting of 31 syllables, divided into lines of 5–7–5–7–7 syllables.

The tanka were generally nature or love lyrics, courtly panegyrics, or poems about the parting of lovers or the transient nature of life. Most of the poems in the Manyoshu anthology (second half of the eighth century) were tanka. Later, until the 15th century, the tanka was virtually the only poetic genre cultivated among the aristocracy. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the tanka was superseded by new genres, the renga and haiku.

Beginning in the 18th century, interest in the classical literature of the ninth to 11th centuries resulted in attempts to revive the tanka. Poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Hiroshi Yosano, Akiko Yosano, Shiki Masaoka, and Takashi Nagatsuka, renewed the content of the tanka with new imagery and with colloquial speech. Later, Takuboku Ishikawa and other democratic poets imbued the tanka with socially oriented themes.

PUBLICATIONS

In Russian translation:

Iz iaponskoi poezii. Moscow, 1964.

laponskie piatistishiia. Moscow, 1971.

Man”esiu, vols. 1–3. Moscow, 1971–72.

REFERENCES

Konrad, N. I. Iaponskaia literatura. Moscow, 1974.
Istoriia sovremennoi iaponskoi literatury. Moscow, 1961. (Translated from Japanese.)
Literatura Vostoka v srednie veka, vol. 1. Moscow, 1970.

N. G. IVANENKO

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive ?
In the 1920s, Michihisa continued to produce a series of commentaries on Joseon historical and unearthed relics, and published the essay "Tanka of Joseon" three times over a long period, in which he said "As Shinjin is a Joseon-inspired magazine, studying Joseon historical relics is highly valuable" (Ryo Michihisa, 1927:31).
Evidence of this worldview is demonstrated in his statement of how the "true song of Joseon being "the Tanka of someone who loves Joseon and who is ready to bury their bones in Joseon"(Ryo Michihisa, 1937: 33), and his themes from the nature and culture of Joseon throughout his time at Shinjin.
Various Tanka were left by Michihisa, what is notable among them is his loving gaze on such subjects as the people, nature, towers, and vases of Joseon.
However, with the outbreak Sino-Japanese War, Michihisa's Tanka worldview shifted dramatically.
As shown above, The Holy War contains Tanka that almost uniformly praise war.
As shown in the poem above, Michihisa's Tanka works after the 1940s do not depict the local characteristics of Joseon that he sought in the Joseon literary circles.
In this way, Michihisa strongly appealed against the superficial war Tanka that gained popularity through the state of war.
The focus of this paper is the Tanka poets and Tanka among Japanese residents in Joseon during the Japanese colonial era, an area largely excluded from scholarly discussions of war literature and ethics.
Ryo Michihisa, in particular, sang Tanka that were surprisingly in line with the war, almost making readers doubt the fact that he had once led the Joseon literary circles in terms of the subject of local culture in the 1930s.
Michihisa, for example, had been the managing editor of the Tanka section of The Anthology of National Poetry, which is possibly the last known Japanese-language poetry in the Korean peninsula.
The present study recommends an investigation of the contention between local Joseon culture and national literature as well as the contradiction in the internal logic characteristic of literature in the late Japanese colonial era in genres other than Tanka.
Changes to Literary Ethics of Tanka Poets on the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese Colonial Era

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