GW Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Kim-Renaud East Asian Humanities Lecture Series
Friday, April 8, 2022 | 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm EDT
Rome Hall Room 459 (In-Person ONLY)
NOTE: All non-GW affiliated attendees attending the event must comply with GW’s COVID-19 policy in order to attend this event, including showing proof of vaccination. While masks are no longer required, it is highly encouraged indoors. For frequently asked questions, please refer to GW’s guidance.
Join us for a talk with Dr. Gustav Heldt on the The Tosa Diary‘s Tale of Nakamaro
About
Having spent his entire adult life as an official in the Tang empire, Abe no Nakamaro (698-770) has come to represent the maximum extent to which a Japanese person might engage with the continent in premodern times. The most detailed and thought-provoking depiction of his life there occurs in an anecdote related by the fictional female diarist of Tosa nikki (The Tosa Diary, ca. 935) in which he bids farewell to his former friends with a waka poem he composes prior to setting out on what would be a failed attempt to return home to Japan. The separate acts of poet composition, inscription and translation detailed in this anecdote have attracted considerable interest among Anglophone scholars on account of the insights they appear to offer into premodern Japanese notions of linguistic difference within a wider East Asian context. Whereas these other scholars have all focused on Nakamaro’s inscription of his poem in Chinese characters, however, little attempt has been made to explain why someone who had spent the majority of his adult life overseas would need a translator to convey the poem’s import to his audience. In attempting to answer this question, my talk will focus on the intertextual links between his waka and earlier Tang poems, as well as the connections between the setting in which it is composed and historical conditions governing Japan’s relations with the continent at the time Tosa nikki was written.
Registration
The event is open to the public. All attendees must follow GW’s COVID policy to attend this event.
Speaker
Dr. Gustav Heldt, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, University of Virginia
Speaker
Gustav Heldt is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Virginia. My area of specialization is in the language, literature, and cultural history of Japan prior to contact with the West with related interests in gender, poetics, ritual practices, comparative historiography, and myth. At the University of Virginia I have regularly teach courses such as JPTR 3010 (Survey of Japanese Literature), JAPN 4710 (Introduction to Literary Japanese), EAST 1010 (East Asian Canons and Cultures), as well as seminars on more specialized topics such as Japanese myth, the Tale of Genji, and Japanese court women’s literature. My first book The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan explored the links between classical Japanese court poetry and the ritual enactment of authority by powerful members of the Heian court. Since then I have written a translation of Japan’s earliest surviving narrative, the Kojiki, and co-edited a volume on cultural exchanges across Eurasia in the middle ages. My current book project is an in-depth study of Tosa nikki, Japan’s earliest surviving vernacular diary.
