Man'yoshu, Book 14 ─ A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary

Vovin (Japanese, U. of Hawai'i-Manoa) continues his new English translation of the earliest and largest Japanese poetic anthology, compiled between 759 and 782 AD, with detailed commentaries. He has already published volumes 15 and five. He will turn next to volume 20, because it contains many poems in Eastern Old Japanese, with which he has become familiar now because many poems in volume 14 were composed in it. Thereafter, he can return to the more familiar and more widely used Western Old Japanese. For each of the 229 poems, he provides the original text, kana transliteration, Romanization, glossing with morphemic analysis, English translation, and commentary. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Alexander Vovin, Professor of East Asian Languages at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has published extensively on Japanese, Ainu, Korean and Tungusic, as well as other languages of East and Inner Asia. Among his major works are A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu (Brill, 1993), A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) and Nihongo Keitoron no Genzai/Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese Language (co-edited with Osada Toshiki, the International Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, 2003).