Between the early 10th century and the 15th century, the Japanese emperors ordered the compilation of twenty-one anthologies of poetry. Former Grand Archbishop Kakuchū’s poem is included in the seventh anthology, the Senzaiwakashū (Senzaishū for short, “Collection of a Thousand Years”), compiled by Fujiwara Shunzei between 1183 and 1188. The Senzaishū was the first anthology in which poems with Buddhist themes, called shakkyō-ka, appeared as an independent category. (The numbering of the Senzaishū poems depends on the version to which one is referring. In our listing, the lower number refers to the poem’s number in Ishihara Kiyoshi’s Shakkyō-ka no Kenkyū. The higher number refers to the poem’s number in Kubota Jun’s Senzaiwakashū.)
The compilers of the anthologies gave many poems a short prose preface, now considered aesthetically inseparable from the poems. To join preface to poem in a way analogous to English poetry, in our translation we’ve presented the preface as the poem’s title. As the preface to Senzaishū 1216/1219 indicates, the poem alludes to the Buddhist version of the Prodigal Son story, from the Lotus Sutra, the 50-year journey of the son who wanders away and comes back home.
The Japanese original of this poem (like most poems in the imperial anthologies) is a waka, the thirty-one syllable form that was primary in Japanese poetics for a thousand years. Our translation doesn’t imitate the syllabic form of the original, on the reasoning that there isn’t a strong tradition of syllabics in English poetry. Japanese poetry is written in vertical columns, whereas English poetry is written in horizontal lines. The syllables in waka are understood to be broken into groups of 5 - 7 - 5 - 7 - 7 syllables, and these groupings are sometimes rendered as five lines in English translations. But in making “line management” choices in our translation we chose to let the English syntax take precedence over the original syntactical arrangement. Our goal was to create an interesting English poem that conveys the emotional and spiritual argument of the Japanese original, and that honors the daring brevity and compression of the waka form.