What book are you reading now?

[OrphanPip]

Some of the poems are pretty beautiful but in the end I'm under the opinion that they're doomed to be lost in translation. Japanese can be a tricky language to translate but it's also changed a lot since the writing of the book - older Japanese must be even harder.

Although the book was written before Feudal Japan you're kind of right. The introduction explains everything you need to know though so that's not really the reason why it's going slowly - I'll definitely see it through until the end! I just ordered a bunch of books and 'Kokoro' was one of them - heard loads of good things about it Also ordered, amongst other things, the diary of the author behind Genji.

I couldn't remember the date of Tale off the top of my head, haha. I'm not too knowledgeable about Asian literature, it is certainly outside my specialty. Older Japanese literature in particular is usually out of my frame of reference. I've read Ihara's Five Women who Loved Love, which didn't move me much but there's an interesting folk-literature aspect to the stories that was interesting.