Book fourteen of the Man’yōshῡ (‘Anthology of Myriad Leaves’) continues Alexander Vovin’s new English translation of this 20-volume major work which was compiled between c.759 and 782 AD, making it the earliest and largest Japanese poetic anthology in existence and thus the most important compendium of Japanese culture of the Asuka and Nara periods.Book fourteen is the third volume of the Man’yōshῡ to be published to date (following books fifteen (2009) and five (2011)) and contains 230 tanka poems, together with a few significant variants, bringing the total to 249.This volume will be followed by publication of book twenty (2013) (instead of the previously announced book seventeen) on account of the fact that book twenty also contains many poems by Border Guards written in the same Eastern Old Japanese (EOJ) as do many of the Azuma-period poems that are contained in book fourteen.Each volume of this new translation contains the original text, kana transliteration, romanization, glossing and commentary.
