Hi there,

If anyone's interested in classical Japanese literature, I've started a new blog called Kakekotoba, on which I intend to analyze various classical works in Japanese. I've decided to start with a 19th century novel called Shunshoku Umegoyomi. I'm starting from the original, calligraphed version of the text (kuzushiji), so I'll also be discussing how to read handwritten Japanese from the pre-modern era.

My introductory post on Umegoyomi can be found here. You can find links to my translation posts for the novel on that page as well.

For future updates, be sure to follow me on Twitter! My username is @srunni0. You can subscribe to a mailing list from my blog as well.

Thanks!

This is definitely something I could see my self reading through as it is something I would love to be able to read (to some degree) one day. However there are just a few points that tug at me, nothing major, just something that gets to me. That is how new and old forms are used and mixed seemingly randomly.

兒誉美 instead of 兒譽美 (or possibly even 児誉美)
児與美 instead of 兒與美 (or possibly even 児与美)

And also for a blog aimed at people wanting to get some understanding from classical literature it feels like an unnecessary amount of romaji. The second word in the first post is ninjōbon, I had to click on the link to see that it represented 人情本 which immediately gave me a much deeper understanding of the word. As I said, nothing major but it's just something that stabs at my sense of perfection (call it ocd if you want).

Other that those two things it seems pretty well made to me at a quick look (it's too late for me to start reading it for real now).

Thanks for the suggestions/corrections. I still haven't decided exactly what to do on the 新字体 vs. 旧字体 situation, which is what resulted in the confusion. I used the 旧字体 for 兒 because that's how it appeared in the original text, but of course 譽 was not actually used there, so I didn't think to change that. I will have to think some more about how I should approach this. On the one hand, 旧字体 is good for maintaining originality, but when most users will be typing in 新字体 with their IMEs, it might be better to stick to that for SEO purposes.

As for the romaji situation, I'm not really sure what to do. I don't really want to randomly insert Japanese words into the main body of the posts (since this is supposed to be a translation blog), but I get what you're saying about it being difficult to understand. I started adding the Japanese versions of words in parentheses in later posts, but things haven't been entirely settled stylistically (for the posts).

Sounds nice. I'm working on a PhD in Japanese literature, doing Genji, so I read a lot of classical Japanese and I've been learning kuzushiji. I'm not all that well versed in late-Edo stuff so I've never heard of this novel.

Quote:I'm not all that well versed in late-Edo stuff so I've never heard of this novel.

One of the reasons I chose this novel instead of something more popular, like Genji or Makura no Soshi or Kokinshuu was because it's not that popular, so it would hopefully be more useful to people like you who have experience with premodern Japanese, but focus on more mainstream areas.

If you come across any mistakes in my posts, please post any suggestions/corrections in the comments of the blog! I could use help from people like you.

Nice project. Doesn't look like the text is available on Aozora. It would have made it easier to follow along. Here's the author on Wikipedia: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%82%BA%E...5%E6%B0%B4

I'm always amazed at how people can read this stuff. Did you take classes, or are you self-trained?

Sounds interesting; I've bookmarked it for later.

Eikyu Wrote:Nice project. Doesn't look like the text is available on Aozora. It would have made it easier to follow along. Here's the author on Wikipedia: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%82%BA%E...5%E6%B0%B4

I'm always amazed at how people can read this stuff. Did you take classes, or are you self-trained?

If you have a background in classical Japanese it's relatively easy to learn to read kuzushiji kana, if you have a little book like 辞典かな that shows many cursive forms of each kana type. The best way is just to start with something that has a typeset form you can check. The 版本 (woodblock prints) of the kind the OP is reading tend to be easier than 写本 in any case. But people often say "it's just scribbles" even when they can read regular Japanese, but don't forget that people who don't know Japanese often say printed texts are just scribbles.

I'm still not at the point where I can read kuzushiji without any help at all, but I've been reading some Genji commentaries that don't have 翻刻 -- I can still get a lot of help because any quotations from the Genji itself I can obviously figure out, and if they quote other commentaries that are typeset I can get some assistance there as well. For the remainder I tend to have at least some idea of what the text is going to be saying.

EDIT: Also, archives of 写本 and 版本 like the Diet library or Waseda's collection are a godsend because the images are usually huge, so you can zoom in on unclear or faded parts. And they're in color, unlike most printed 影印 which tend to be in black and white only.

Are you saying that this is a woodblock print? I wonder how they do that because it looks like a manuscript.

"But people often say "it's just scribbles" even when they can read regular Japanese, but don't forget that people who don't know Japanese often say printed texts are just scribbles."

Yeah, it was used a form of writing at some point. So it has to be humanly possible to read it. I'm sure that as you get used to it, the scribbles start to make sense.

I'm interested in pre-modern Japanese, I mainly read stories from the 今昔物語集. I'll be watching your blog, though I'm not particularly interested in Edo.

Remember, Japanese wasn't standardized until after WW2, until then it was up to the author what to do. You could even pick your own kanji for a word if you wanted to (and yes, many did).

Eikyu Wrote:Are you saying that this is a woodblock print? I wonder how they do that because it looks like a manuscript.

It's definitely a woodblock print; you can see it in the faded area where it didn't get fully pressed down (and just the style of the writing). Woodblocks were first written by someone and then carved out so they look handwritten.

I haven't encountered many examples of authors picking their own kanji for things; there are some old and obsolete usages.

Thanks for the information. They went through so much effort to print these books. They would have had to carve each new book by hand. It would have been so much simpler to use movable type (and easier to read for us).

It might have seemed easier to do the woodblock because they still didn't have a standard set of kana, and so all the hentai-gana plus the kanji, furigana, and other special symbols may have made movable type rather difficult.

But it is kind of amazing when you think of these works like the Kogetsusho or Bakin's novels that were thousands of pages long. I can't imagine how long it must have taken to carve all those woodblocks (since they carve out the areas that aren't the symbols) and to store all the woodblocks for future printings.

I think you guys are great for wanting to read classical Japanese literature. Personally, the stuff bores me to tears. I'm reading short stories from Rashoumon in class right now and I can't wait until we are finally finished with it.

Eikyu Wrote:I'm always amazed at how people can read this stuff. Did you take classes, or are you self-trained?

I took 2 semesters of classical Japanese in college. At first, we only read texts typewritten in modern fonts using historical kana orthography. In the second semester, I started reading Kanbun and kuzushiji. In fact, Kanbun was probably my favorite topic, but it's more complicated than this and I don't have access to any handwritten documents, so I thought it'd be a poor place to start.

As I live in America, I'm stuck with whatever is available on the internet (I'm sure there are plenty of kanbun scans online - I've run across a few myself - but I haven't had the chance to research them and find an interesting one to work on). If I were living in Tokyo, I'd get a nice scanner and just buy the books myself from Jinbocho. I had a chance to visit there when I was studying abroad in Tokyo, but I unfortunately didn't have any space to bring back books (and I didn't know I would be so interested in this at the time). That's what my classical Japanese professor said she did every time she visits Japan.

Ever since then, I've been doing it on my own (though hopefully some of you guys can give me tips!).

Hashiriya Wrote:I'm reading short stories from Rashoumon in class right now and I can't wait until we are finally finished with it.

Haha, I had to read/translate the original story from Konjaku Monogatarishuu that Rashomon is based on for my first semester final exam. We only read a part of it, so I'll have to go back and read the rest.

yudantaiteki Wrote:It's definitely a woodblock print; you can see it in the faded area where it didn't get fully pressed down (and just the style of the writing). Woodblocks were first written by someone and then carved out so they look handwritten.

Right, this is woodblock printing that imitates handwriting from that period. This practice continued well into the Meiji period, although typesetting started to gain popularity as well. It wasn't fully standardized until after WW2 though, of course.

My 15th post is up now - I had some trouble with a few kanji, so I could use some help!

Also, I'm thinking about interspersing the Umegoyomi posts with some Heian work. Would anyone be interested in Konjaku Monogatarishū? Or perhaps a Kanbun work would be more interesting?

I'm on vacation and don't have my dictionaries, so these are tentative guesses. The くん might be 呉, and the second kanji of かみさん looks like 君 to me. That's the best I can do.

The Konjaku Monogatarishū is a ton of fun to read, I recommend it.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I'm on vacation and don't have my dictionaries, so these are tentative guesses. The くん might be 呉, and the second kanji of かみさん looks like 君 to me. That's the best I can do.

Sounds good to me. My favorite くずし字 dictionary, which was hosted at http://r-jiten.nabunken.go.jp/ previously but was taken offline, is now back, at http://clioz39.hi.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ships/ZClient/W34/. 呉 made sense immediately, and I was able to confirm 君 using the くずし字 DB.

Out of curiosity, which dictionaries do you use for くずし字?

Kyoshi88 Wrote:The Konjaku Monogatarishū is a ton of fun to read, I recommend it.

I managed to find scans of it online, so I'll probably go with Konjaku.

For kana I use 辞典かな. The kanji one I like the best is くずし字用例辞典, although this is most useful when you have some guess as to what the kanji might be. I also have くずし字解読辞典 which lets you look up a character by the shape; I'm not used to it yet so I can't use it very well but it might be helpful.

I think those are the books that my 古文／漢文 professor had, and they were definitely handy. I'll have to see if I can get a copy of them, perhaps through Kinokuniya New York.

In any case, my next post is up. I'm still considering whether to go with Konjaku Monogatarishu or something else for my Heian era translation, but either way I'll probably start on one in the next week or two. Kanbun might be a little too difficult to explain.

This is a late response to this, but I have reading your articles and am looking forward to reading more in the future.

Thank you for such lovely posts! I am a subscriber now, through google reader.
I just started learning Early Modern Japanese and Japanese interpretation of Chinese classics, haven't tried to decipher cursive forms yet but this will be quite useful in the future.

The Konjaku Monogatarishu has a lot of relatively easy to read stories since they're setsuwa 説話 (narratives) so it's fairly easy to follow who is saying what. Note that not all stories are about Japan, many are also from India or China.

You can access the 原文 via Kyoto university: http://edb.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit/k...j_top.html

For example: http://edb.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit/k...7ft01.html (mouse-over to see 活字)

Kyoshi88 Wrote:You can access the 原文 via Kyoto university: http://edb.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit/k...j_top.html

For example: http://edb.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit/k...7ft01.html (mouse-over to see 活字)

Right, that's one of the advantages of going with Konjaku ― I can try to read it myself, but if I get stuck, I have the option of seeing the printed version. I guess I'll start with it next week.