Man'yōshū

However, the Man'yōshū is considered singular, even in comparison with later works, in choosing primarily Ancient Japanese themes, extolling Shintō virtues of forthrightness (真, makoto) and virility (益荒男振り, masuraoburi).

In addition, the language of many entries of the Man'yōshū exerts a powerful sentimental appeal to readers: [T]his early collection has something of the freshness of dawn [...] There are irregularities not tolerated later, such as hypometric lines; there are evocative place names and makurakotoba; and there are evocative exclamations such as kamo, whose appeal is genuine even if incommunicable.

In other words, the collection contains the appeal of an art at its pristine source with a romantic sense of venerable age and therefore of an ideal order since lost.

[7]The compilation of the Man'yōshū also preserves the names of earlier Japanese poetic compilations, these being the Ruijū Karin (類聚歌林, Forest of Classified Verses), several texts called the Kokashū (古歌集, Collections of Antique Poems), as well as at least four family or individual anthologies known as kashū (家集) belonging to Kakimoto no Hitomaro, Kasa no Kanamura, Takahashi no Mushimaro and Tanabe no Sakimaro.

[8] The literal translation of the kanji that make up the title Man'yōshū (万 — 葉 — 集) is "ten thousand — leaves — collection".

[19] But the most prominent and important poets of the third period were Ōtomo no Tabito, Yakamochi's father and the head of a poetic circle in the Dazaifu,[20] and Tabito's friend Yamanoue no Okura, possibly an immigrant from the Korean kingdom of Paekche, whose poetry is highly idiosyncratic in both its language and subject matter and has been highly praised in modern times.

[24] In addition to its artistic merits, the Man'yōshū is significant for using the earliest Japanese writing system, the cumbersome man'yōgana.

Such usage of Chinese characters to phonetically represent Japanese syllables eventually led to the birth of kana, as they were created from simplified cursive forms (hiragana) and fragments (katakana) of man'yōgana.

Donald Keene explained in a preface to the Nihon Gakujutsu Shinkō Kai edition of the Man'yōshū: One "envoy" (hanka) to a long poem was translated as early as 1834 by the celebrated German orientalist Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783–1835).

Klaproth, having journeyed to Siberia in pursuit of strange languages, encountered some Japanese castaways, fishermen, hardly ideal mentors for the study of 8th century poetry.

[30]In 1940, Columbia University Press published a translation created by a committee of Japanese scholars and revised by the English poet, Ralph Hodgson.

Lastly, a mokkan excavated at the Ishigami archaeological site in Asuka, Nara, contains the first 14 characters of poem 1391, in volume 7, written in Man'yōgana.