August 23, 2023

The Large Library of Japanese Poetry in Translations by Alexander Dolin was shortlisted for the Annual National Book of the Year Competition

Published with the support of the ICF, the Large Library of Japanese Poetry in Translations by Alexander Dolin was shortlisted for the Annual National Competition ‘Book of the Year’. The winners will be announced at the award ceremony on 31 August 2023.

The anthology compiled by Alexander Dolin covers a period of one and a half thousand years. This is the only anthology of its kind, which presents the works of 450 famous and about 100 unknown Japanese poets of the 6th – 20th centuries, translated into Russian. This work is the result of the enormous work of one person – Alexander Dolin, professor of Japanese literature and comparative cultural studies at the School of Oriental Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and emeritus professor at Akita International University, who lived in Japan for more than a quarter of a century and wrote more than 70 books and monographs .

‘The idea of creating a panoramic picture of Japanese poetry came to me more than 40 years ago,’ recalls Alexander Dolin. – The selection process is very long and painful, perhaps the most difficult. Here I imitated the editors of the classical anthologies of antiquity. I took huge Japanese series – the largest of them has 100 volumes, of which 30 volumes relate to poetry, and I selected the key works and translated them. As for the poetry of modern times, the most complete collection of poetry of the 20th century, or more precisely, the post-war period, contains about 400 volumes.’