HUMAN nature and its needs and emotions, communicate themselves vividly across a 12-hundred- year gap in these little gems from eighth-century Japan.
Graeme Wilson translated them from the Manyoshu, the first anthology of Japanese poetry, probably compiled at imperial command (Harvill, £12).
DEAR LADY
You seem, dear lady, to have been
Living in Eternity.
Where but in that Timeless Land
Could you thus have grown to be
More young than when, long years ago,
Last you deigned to dazzle me?
Otomo no Miyori (d 774)
WORLD ENOUGH
I have lived too long in this hovel of a world,
in temporal distress,
To waste more time in longing for Nirvana's
Infinite nothingness.
(Anonymous (eighth century)
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