Sei Shonagon, _The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon_, trans. Ivan Morris

I READ THIS in the mid-to-late 1980s, right after I read The Tale of Genji; it hails from the same time and place, the Japanese royal court circa 1000 BCE. Though Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikubu, one reads, did not get along, the Pillow Book is the best place to go if you have finished Tale of Genji but still haven't had your fill of the subtleties of court life in Heian-kyo.

Having re-read Genji because I was curious about the new Royall Tyler translation, I found myself thinking about returning to this as well. As far as I know, there is no new translation of this--the Ivan Morris Penguin, with its extensive footnotes, is the same one I read back in the second Reagan administration--but I have had a new perspective on Sei Shonagon since encountering her in John D'Agata's anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay.

D'Agata is particularly interested in prose forms that dance with the poetic--not in having saturatedly lyrical language, which poetry rarely has these days in any case, but in having an oblique relation to representation, or by a surprising formal strategy, or in relying on the implicit...you get the idea. His anthology The Next American Essay contained an intriguing array of such pieces, all dating from recent decades. Lost Origins, his next anthology, looked for other examples of prose forms that engage the poetic, but going back to antiquity.  And there was where I re-encountered Sei Shonagon.

The Pillow Book engages poetry partly because poetry was so woven into the fabric of the court. Everyone was supposed to be able to write poems (sometimes on the spot), understand poems, quote poems, recognize allusions to famous poems...everyday was oral exam day in Heian-kyo. Sei Shonagon is always delighted to hear one of her poems landed well, that people were repeating it. She quotes poems regularly.

Beyond that, though, some of her entries might, with the right lens, be poems--not in her terms, but in ours. A good many of her entries are lists: "Things That Give a Clean Feeling," "Things That Give an Unclean Feeling" (a longer list), "Adorable Things" (a fairly long list, despite her being capable of considerable acerbity). I liked these lists the first time around, as they conjured up the court world in vivid detail, but reading them as a kind of poem (as D'Agata had persuaded me to do) made them even better. Let me quote "Things That Give a Clean Feeling" in its entirety:

An earthen cup. A new metal bowl.
A rush mat.
The play of the light on water as one pours it into a vessel.
A new wooden chest.

See what I mean? It was written just over a thousand years ago, but the imagist detail, the suppression of narrative, the juxtaposition of bare domestic items and that sudden "play of light"--if I came across this in a journal, I would check the contributors' list to see if this person had a book out. And she does--Sei Shoinagon's Pillow Book.