Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons

369 Pages·2013·3.052 MB·English

by  Wiebke Denecke

Classical World Literatures
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Classical World Literatures
Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman
Comparisons
wiebke denecke
1
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Denecke, Wiebke.
Classical world literatures : Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman comparisons / Wiebke Denecke.
pages. cm.
ISBN 978–0–19–997184–8
1. Classical literature—History and criticism. 2. East Asian literature—History
and criticism. I. Title.
PA3010.D46 2013
809—dc23
2012046082
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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F ü r Z
fortunati amoris divinatione
denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen
daß sie dich beh ü ten
auf allen deinen Wegen
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
CHAPTER 1 Setting the Stage: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman
Constellations 20
CHAPTER 2 Starting avant la lettre : An Essay on How to Tell the
Beginnings of Literature and Eloquence 62
C HAPTER 3 Latecomers: Of Ornament, Simplicity, and
Decline 81
C HAPTER 4 City-Building or Writing? How Aeneas and Prince
Shōtoku Made Rome and Japan 120
C HAPTER 5 Rome and Kyoto: Capitals, Genres, Gender 154
CHAPTER 6 Poetry in Exile: Sugawara no Michizane and
Ovid 203
C HAPTER 7 Satire in Foreign Attire: The Ambivalences of
Learning in Late Antiquity and Medieval Japan 234
CHAPTER 8 The Synoptic Machine: Sino-Japanese and
Greco-Roman Juxtapositions 265
EPILOGUE Beyond the Comforts of Infl uence: Deep
Comparisons 289
Bibliography 301
Index 327
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has taken time and courage. I have been blessed with people around
me who made sure that neither was in short supply. Without them I could have
never embarked on this ambitious project. I had some fairly circumscribed China-
and Japan-related book projects lined up, when suddenly opportunity struck in
2004: a long-awaited and eye-opening trip to Greece with my husband Zolti
and my parents, and a conference on “transcultural literary history” hosted by a
Swedish research group at Villa Brevik outside of Stockholm, where I presented
faute de mieux on early Japanese and Latin attempts at writing literary history,
made me realize that this book needed to be written. I found myself wanting
to make it up to my formidable teachers of Latin and Greek at the humanistic
“Max-Planck Gymnasium” in my hometown of Göttingen who taught me the love
of grammar and Greek and Latin literature from childhood, before I could even
utter a word in a foreign language other than my native German: the late Fritz
Tamm, Helga Ströhlein, Oscar Mattner, Wolfgang Fauth, and Otta Wenskus. I felt
I had let them down, having drifted to studies of classical China and Japan instead
of staying with my passionate interests in Classical Antiquity.
But the idea was not enough. I needed encouragement to work on the com-
parison of the Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman cultural constellations for which
I could not look to any previous pioneering scholarship. Throughout, Zolti was
the most vigorous fan of the project; David Damrosch an enthusiastic supporter
when the road was bumpy; Michael Puett an ever-inspiring advocate of bold com-
parative work; and the positive response to the earliest seed chapters from Wai-yee
Li, Katharina Volk, and Stephen Owen gave me further confi dence that this could
work. A conference on “ Translatio: Translation and Cultural Appropriation in the
Ancient World,” which David and I organized at Columbia University in 2006,
confi rmed the impression that scholars of Greco-Roman, Near Eastern and Indian
antiquities were all too eager to ask a new set of compelling comparative ques-
tions. An emerging wave seemed under way.
Graced with support on so many fronts, I was lucky to spend time in stimulat-
ing communities that allowed me to devote myself to the project. The period at
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