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Revision as of 06:34, 13 September 2012

Poetry Stub‑class Low‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Poetry, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of poetry on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PoetryWikipedia:WikiProject PoetryTemplate:WikiProject PoetryPoetry Stub This article has been rated as Stub-class on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale. Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Japan: Culture Start‑class Mid‑importance

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What is tanka prose?

This article contains no references to respectable sources on Japanese literature. When I first saw the term "tanka prose" (of course on the disambiguation page that should have its name changed) I assumed it was some obscure translation of the term Uta Monogatari (歌物語). But the page doesn't mention the correct Japanese term once, and inaccurately groups the Tosa Diary in too. All of the sources seem to be non-academic in nature, and the authors are apparently non-notable professional poets (not Japanese scholars), and different online sources brought up by Googling their names indicated a general lack of knowledge about Japanese language and literary history ( spells Ariwara no Narihira's name as Narihara, and makes a bizarre, unsourced claim that he and Ono no Komachi used the phrase one thousand times). Can we delete this page or rename it to Uta monogatari and include some small reference to this terminology and how inadequate it is? elvenscout742 (talk) 13:55, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm completely overhauling this article. The previous fancruft was completely wrong and poorly written. The sources cited were apparently all bogus, so I deleted them and replaced them with some nice Keene. If anyone wants to reinstate anything that I have removed, please discuss it here or on my Talk page. elvenscout742 (talk) 16:04, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

In case I forget the rule, I'm putting this here: on Misplaced Pages a lack of information is better than misleading or false information (Misplaced Pages:Editing policy) elvenscout742 (talk) 16:17, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Please do not unilaterally move this article

The sources cited in the older version are not reputable academic sources, and the information contained in this article before the move was either completely inaccurate (when it referenced ancient Japanese literature) or fancruft that violated Misplaced Pages policies on undue weight. If you want to make a new wiki to promote a "new genre of fiction", there is software online that allows you to do that. But Misplaced Pages is supposed to be an encyclopedia based on proper scholarship. The material described in the previous article is not based on anything that was written in pre-modern Japan. The authors cited are all clearly ignorant of Japanese language and literature, as their writings routinely make bizarre claims about what was "standard" in ancient Japanese literature, and they misspell the names of well-known poets, etc. I don't even mind leaving a minor reference to so-called "tanka prose" in this article, but it needs to be kept from overrunning the page with fancruft, and it needs to be worded tastefully and accurately. Misplaced Pages is not a place for original research, nor is it a place to post material that you found online somewhere but is not notable or worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia article. elvenscout742 (talk) 00:35, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Tanka prose is a contemporary English-language literary form and movement derived from classical Japanese prosimetra (prose plus poetry); your uta monogatari (poem tale) is one type only of the many types of classical Japanese prosimetra, e.g., kotobagaki (headnote or preface), nikki (memoir or diary), shu (poetry collection), kiko (travelogue) and so on. Contemporary examples of tanka prose are not modeled solely upon uta monogatari; most, in fact, are not but adopt some of the other models mentioned immediately above as well as introducing forms unknown to classical Japanese literature.

As for terminology, in lieu of tanka prose, one might have retained wabun (“waka writings”) but no one writes waka in English; poets write tanka in English and, you will admit, it is a short jump from “waka writings” to the analogous “tanka prose.”

Attempting to subsume all of these types of tanka prose, whether of classical Japanese origin or contemporary English derivation, under the banner of uta monogatari only muddies the issue. Your rewrite of “Tanka prose” as “Uta monogatari,” and your redirection of the original Tanka Prose page to your Uta monogatrari, is not so much a revision as a highjacking. I can see the need for a good article on Uta monogatari as well as on nikki, Elvenscout, but the categories tanka prose and uta monogatari are not, as you seem to presume they are, coterminous.

In your rewrite, you retain verbatim, under the sub-heading “Description,” a paragraph from the original “Tanka Prose” article; you have carefully removed the footnotes, however, and have therein committed plagiarism as the definiton of the form there provided is taken directly from the sourced articles, “The Elements of Tanka Prose” and “The Road Ahead for Tanka in English.” You have also carefully removed all other references to contemporary tanka prose writers, and contemporary tanka prose was the point of the original Wiki article. These edits, which are really attempts to obliterate, are consistent with the tone of your comments on this Talk page where you characterize the original article in pejorative terms throughout; it lacks “respectable sources,” those sources are “non-academic,” the cited authors are “non-notable professional poets,” your Googling (!) of said poet’s names “indicated a general lack of knowledge,” the sources are “bogus” and “fancruft.” You set yourself up as the final arbiter of reputable sources, of Japanese scholarship, of contemporary English poetry, and you do so not in the public arena, where you might be challenged, but behind the safe and sterile mask of anonymity.

My view of the proper resolution of this matter, Elvenscout, would be to see you write your scholarly article on Uta monogatari, if you so desire, and to see the Tanka prose article, which is really concerned more with a contemporary English derivation than the Japanese original, retained as is or, perhaps, with slight modification. Tanka prose and uta monogatari, as I mentioned previously, are not synonyms.

Tristan noir (talk) 01:21, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

But the term tanka prose is inherently oxymoronic. A tanka is a type of poem. When I first saw the term tanka prose yesterday, I thought it meant prose adaptations of tanka (along the lines of comic book movies), and that is still the only meaning I can think of that would make any sense. It is theoretically possible that at some time in the future the word tanka could catch on in English-speaking countries (as haiku already has) and develop a different meaning from the Japanese (as some would argue haiku already has). But this has not happened, except, apparently, in some small literary circle that do not really deserve their own Misplaced Pages article. The term tanka prose is equally attached exclusively to this small circle.

Your categorization of uta monogatari as "one type only of the many types of classical Japanese prosimetra" is flawed. No Japanese literary historian claims that waka-shū, nikki, kotobagaki and kikō are part of some all-encompassing form of literature called "prosimetra". Waka-shū are merely anthologies of poetry, and they often containkotobagaki (headnotes) that explain the background of the poems. They are not literary works that combine poetry and prose. Nikki are prose works that usually feature poetry. But if they are part of the same classification, then the Kojiki and Nihon-Shoki (as well as most other classical Japanese works) are also "prosometra".

Which brings me to the next point. I will admit that it is a short jump from waka writings to tanka prose. But the fact is that the Japanese term you cite wabun (和文, literally "Japanese language writing) does not mean what you apparently think it means. The word means "Japanese writing", as opposed to kanbun (writing in Chinese), the other dominant form of writing in pre-modern Japan. It includes non-poetic (prose, historical, etc.) written works, and of course as I mentioned above many of those works also included waka, but they are not called wabun because they happen to contain waka; both words just contain the character 和, meaning Japan as opposed to China (or to the West). In modern times, wabun also means "Japanese, as opposed to foreign, writings". I'm not sure if a large number of English-speaking people have made the same mistake as you and invented the phrase "tanka prose" accordingly, or if this mistake is based on an erroneous association of "wabun" with "haibun". There is no Japanese term for "waka writings", unless you consider uta monogatari to be said term. This is why I moved the article rather than simply posting it for deletion.

Most dictionaries will define wabun simply as "Japanese writing" or some such variant (, for example), but NO reputable source will claim that it means "a literary genre whose individual compositions employ two modes of writing -— verse and prose"

I am not setting myself up as the final arbiter of anything, including Japanese literature (I consider that post to belong, at least outside Japan, to Donald Keene). I am even willing to accept that "tanka prose" is the name of a movement of English literature that has nothing to do with Japan, but I maintain that it is a small movement to which you are trying to grant undue weight. If you have reputable, secondary sources that contradict me on the notability of this term, please show me them.

(I don't mean to respond to your ad hominem attacks, but: project much? I am not hiding anything but my real name. I blanked my user page 2 years ago because I didn't want my Misplaced Pages profile to appear in a Google-search of my e-mail -- which is on my resume -- and indirectly tie me back to edits I made 6 or 7 years ago that I now realize were stupid. But anyone is perfectly free to check the old version of my page and see my e-mail address and a photo of me. You, on the other hand, have no user page, and have apparently only ever edited Misplaced Pages to propagate the so-called "tanka prose" idea.)

If my removal of the fancruft on this page and the bad citations has inadvertently created a sentence or two worth of plagiarism from one of the authors that had previously been cited, I apologize. I will remove the offending text.

Googling remains a valid method of finding out how well-established certain terms are. A search for "tanka prose" yielded less than 10,000 results, despite your article claiming that the movement had exist for over 30 years. If it were notable there would be scholars studying it and publishing articles (secondary sources) on it that are well-researched and do not make bizarre claims about "tanka prose" dating back to ancient Japan with people like "Ariwara no Narihara". Every one of the authors you previously cited is clearly ignorant of what waka in ancient Japan were like.

Your article contained outrageous statements that "tanka prose" was composed by Ki no Tsurayuki in the 10th century, and hinted that the Ise monogatari was an even earlier example of "tanka prose". You failed to provide sources for these statements in over a year, and when they were deleted you callously reverted the deletion, still not providing any sources. And now that I have provided sources to the contrary, you have tried to change what you claim you were arguing for by proclaiming "tanka prose" to be "a contemporary English-language literary form and movement". This was not what your article claimed, and that is the only reason I saw fit to fix it. I am not interested in getting in lengthy debates about obscure movements in modern English literature, as my specialty is ancient Japanese literature. Stop claiming "tanka prose" dates back to ancient Japan, cite valid sources that justify using inaccurate terminology (Misplaced Pages allows this if it is well-established in English), and stop making personal attacks, and we will have no more problem.

elvenscout742 (talk) 06:34, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

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