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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.
That material in “Uta monogatari” under the sub-heading “Influence outside Japan” is wholly erroneous and unsupported by any citation; I’m going to remove it therefore. Sanford Goldstein’s “Tanka Walk” is offered as an example of said uta monogatari influence; it is doubtful that the author of the article, Elvenscout, could have read Goldstein’s work, not only because it was published in a small out-of-print poetry journal in 1983 but also because the style and form of Goldstein’s “Tanka Walk” have nothing in common with uta monogatari. Goldstein describes his daily exercise regimen over the course of many days and intersperses this narration with tanka and meditations inspired by his walking and his life in Japan. “Tanka Walk,” therefore, has much in common with nikki (diary / memoir) and nothing in common with the poem-tale as elaborated in Ise or Yamato. A citation of Goldstein might be appropriate in an article on nikki but this article does not concern nikki. Further, Elvenscout offers his opinion, again unsupported by any citation, that the poetic literature included in the various journals that he mentions is inspired by uta monogatari. This assertion does not correspond with the facts as any neutral reader of these journals can easily ascertain by perusing their contents. Where Japanese inspiration is cited, appeals are made not to uta monogatari but to the entire spectrum of early Japanese prosimetra (compositions that mix prose and verse, the verse, in this case, being tanka’s predecessor, waka).
Tristan noir (talk) 23:34, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
Some replies to your many claims & counterclaims, Elvenscout, in your three consecutive long posts on this talk page. I’ll place your remarks in bold, the better to distinguish your words from mine.
But the term tanka prose is inherently oxymoronic. Western writers of haibun often use the term “haiku prose.” By that name, they mean a prose composition, written “in the spirit of haikai,” which also incorporates haiku. Take “tanka prose” as its parallel in construction. If the writers of these literary forms in English & other western languages have reached a consensus and understand that these terms define a specific type of composition, then objections based upon the circumstance that Japanese offers no equivalent term have no currency.
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". Perhaps, perhaps not. Prosimetrum is an accepted critical term that is applied to compositions of prose-plus-verse in any language. Helen McCullough contributed an article entitled “Combinations of Poetry and Prose in Classical Japanese Narrative” to Harris & Reichl (eds.), Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse(1997). Is McCullough, in your opinion, a reputable scholarly source? But your objection is really beside the point in any discussion of “tanka prose.” Japanese literary historians may or may not view shu, nikki, monogatari and kiko as an “all-encompassing form” called prosimetra. The question is: how do the contemporary writers of “tanka prose” in English view mixtures of tanka plus prose in classical Japanese literature and how do they apply their view to their compositions?
Waka-shū are merely anthologies of poetry, and they often contain kotobagaki (headnotes) that explain the background of the poems. They are not literary works that combine poetry and prose. I understand that many waka-shū are simple collections of poems without prose accompaniment. Your blanket assertion that no waka-shū are “literary works that combine poetry and prose” is easily refuted by simple citation; I refer you to Murasaki Shikibu shū and Kenreimon’in Ukyō Daibu no Shū for well-known examples of shu where there is extensive use of prose and, indeed, a kind of narrative. You cite Keene favorably, Elvenscout, so you may wish to turn to his book, Travelers of a Hundred Ages (pp. 79-82), where he compares various shū; his discussion directly contradicts your claim. If others are following this discussion, they can readily consult the Bowring and Harries translations of Murasaki Shikibu and Lady Daibu respectively and see that what you claim about shū is at variance with the facts.
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". Any work that combines prose plus verse is a type of prosimetrum. The term is not mine nor is its definition. It has common scholarly acceptance.
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 . . . .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. Thank you for pointing out my error in re “wabun.” I suppose that there is no “wakabun” either. You state that Japanese has no term for “waka writings.” I’m willing to accept your statement at face value. But where tanka & prose are being combined in Western writings (predominately in English, German, French & Dutch), no one is writing uta monogatari strictly, so far as I can determine, nor is anyone exclusively promoting nikki or kiko. The common denominator in the West is that the composition include tanka and prose; some compositions may resemble monogatari, nikki or shu and yet others may lean closer to the modern prose poem. That Japanese offered these poets no ready terminology likely contributed to employment of the term “tanka prose.”
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. That is a curious result, Elvenscout. I just now did a simple search of “tanka prose” and received, per Google, “about 208,000 results.” Perhaps you' d like to try again?
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". . . 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". The body of the original article, minus references, falls just short of 500 words. One paragraph of that article, under the sub-heading “History,” addresses early Japanese literature; that paragraph numbers sixty odd words. The rest of the article, indeed, speaks about English-language adaptation and literary practice, your counterclaim notwithstanding.
Jeffrey Woodward has written of the origins of so-called "tanka prose" the following: From the compilations of the oldest surviving collections of poetry, the Kojiki and Man'yōshū of the 8th century, prose very often accompanied waka. A simple Misplaced Pages search reveals that the Kojiki is not a "collection of poetry" but a quasi-historical prose text that happens to contain poetry here and there. The Man'yōshū . . . is NOT a prose work that heavily features waka . . .This statement is wrong and utterly bizarre. Utterly eccentric, if you will, is your characterization of this quotation as “utterly bizarre.” Edwin A. Cranston, in A Waka Anthology Volume 1, saw fit to translate many pages of the Kojiki; he apparently didn’t care that the work was “quasi-historical” and he also translated much of the prose that prefaces the poems; the prose may be defined as kotobagaki (headnotes) but the prose entries vary considerably in length and purpose; some entries offer contextual explanations for the poem that follows while others verge upon narrative. As for the Man’yōshū, kotobagaki are frequent throughout, often added by the anthologists, but attention should be called, in particular, to Book V of the Manyo where the works of poets such as Ōtomo no Tabito and Yamanoue Okura are collected; these works combine prose and waka in single compositions, your denials to the contrary. Again, if anyone is following this discussion, they need not rely upon your claims and my counterclaims but they can readily resolve these contradictions on their own by reference to translations of this material in Ian Hideo Levy’s Ten Thousand Leaves or in Cranston’s Waka Anthology.
Tanka prose is a Western genre with roots in Japanese. 'Tanka prose' per se, is therefore not a Japanese literary form, and whatever terms, history, and ideas apply to Japanese prosimetra are therefore little more than background and marginalia when discussing the Western literary form. I attempted to find the 'Tanka Prose' article so I could read and comment on what it said, but it has disappeared. The removal of the article and the substitution of something completely irrelevant smacks of sabotage to me. The existing article on Uta monogatari has only a tenuous connection to contemporary Western tanka prose. It is rare for anyone in the West to write items that could be described as uta monogatari. The only things that come to my mind appear in Japan: Themes and Variations edited by Charles Tuttle back in the 1950s. Contemporary Western usage is 1400 years and several cultures away from the Japanese root. If we are to judge tanka prose in Western languages by ancient Japanese standards, then that means we should also judge contemporary sonnets in English by Renaissance Italian standards. That's ridiculous. Literature, by its nature, evolves and travels. Modern authors and critics view the past through the lens of their contemporary understanding. We're poets, not historical re-enactors. Our goal is not to create perfect imitations of an ancient literary culture, but to write new and fresh works. Therefore, since tanka prose is a contemporary Western literature, it deserves its own page.
Elvenscout's diatribe shows a profound lack of knowledge about tanka in English. Tanka has been written and published in English since 1899. Although it is not as well known as haiku in English, it's still a legitimate genre in its own right. A bibliography of tanka shows more than one thousand book length publications, including anthologies, collections, musical compositions, performing arts, illustrated works, and endlessly inventive other applications of tanka, tanka prose, tanka sequence, responsive tanka, shaped tanka, illustrated tanka, musical tanka, and more. Although there are some Orientalist works in which novice authors attempt to imitate the Japanese waka, the vast majority of tanka are independent Western works. Japanese source material provides inspiration, but there's no reason why a poet writing in a Western language should be chained to the Japanese language, anymore than than they should be chained to classical Greek because that's the language Homer wrote in. For that matter, even though Shakespeare is one of the greatest poets writing in English, modern poets don't try to create imitation Shakespeare, either. The modern sonnet is not chained to Elizabethan England, and the modern tanka isn't chained to the Heian and Nara Periods in Japan. Tanka Prose is a distinct literature that deserves its own page.
On the minor matter of the Google Search issue, Elvenscout, I stand corrected. Thank you. I neglected the quotation marks through carelessness and hence achieved the false results. In searching “tanka prose” (with quotation marks), I discovered, indeed, “about 9,280 results,” a result consistent with your earlier report. I thought it might be interesting to search “uta monogatari” (in quotes) as well. I did so and achieved “about 6,570 results” – a lower return, on my investment, than “tanka prose.”
This seems like a fair resolution of the matter, Elvenscout. That portion of the original text that referred to the modern English phenomenon of “tanka prose,” including its bibliography, will be retained as the basis for the revised article. Where reference to Japanese literature is necessary, scholarly citations will be provided. It will take me a few days to craft and post this article as I’m currently engaged in another project. I do not know how to post the new material at Tanka prose without redirecting from your current “Uta monogatari.” Your article should be kept, of course, and I hope you expand it. If there is a means by which to post the new material without redirecting from your article, be so kind as to inform me how this might be achieved. I don’t want to offend by “deleting” your article.
Thank you for your technical advice, grab what you can. And thank you, Elvenscout, for your textual analysis; I’m happy to allow you the last word on the original article and your statistical analysis of it. Can we now move on, Elvenscout, in the interest of true resolution and cooperation, without further warnings, appeals or recollections of “a previous misunderstanding,” and simply turn to the more productive tasks of improving one article on modern English tanka prose and one article on Uta monogatari? Again, I look forward to an expansion of your article on the latter.
