SOURCE: A foreword to The Manyoshu: One Thousand Poems, Columbia University Press, 1965, pp. iii-viii.

In the following excerpt, Keene presents a concise history of translations of the Manyoshu and praises the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai version for its rendering of the poems into English.

The first translations from the Manyōshū into a European language date back more than a century, well before Japan was opened to the West. 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 illiterate Japanese castaways, fishermen, hardly ideal mentors for the study of eighth-century poetry. Not surprisingly, his translation was anything but accurate. Other translations appeared from time to time, particularly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and in 1872 a fair-sized selection of Manyōshū poetry, some 200 poems in all...