D. Sources of Influence and Transmission

21. Revon, Michel. Anthologie de la littèrature japonaise des origines au XXe siécle. Collection Pallas. Paris: Delagrave, 1910.

		The anthology that sounded the ‘death knell of pseudo Japanese verse’ in French and English, in a modern edition from Vertiges, 1986.

The anthology most responsible for introducing Japanese poetry to a wide French readership, and that according to Miner sounded the ‘death knell of pseudo Japanese verse’ in both French and English, making way for ‘true Japanese modes’, imitations and adaptations first by French and later by British and American poets (see A25). Fletcher wrote to Miner that he remembered reading ‘two English, one French, and two German translations of Japanese poetry’ at around the time he wrote his earliest poems with Japanese subjects or imitative of Japanese models (see BH1, 17, and 22c), and the likelihood is that the French would have been that either of Couchoud (19) or Revon, though perhaps it should be recorded as well that no critic writing of Fletcher or others under study here has mentioned two earlier works, Leon de Rosny’s Anthologie japonaise (Paris: Maisonneuve et cie, 1871) and Joseph Dautremer’s Poésies et anecdotes japonaises (Paris: Leroux, 1909). Kawanami convincingly traces several of Crapsey’s ‘cinquains’ to sources in Revon (see CA4), and the Anthologie includes a version of Hagoromo that makes it a possible source for Pound (see BK13d), though nothing in the published record provides direct evidence that he knew of the work. While the Anthologie is the most notable of Revon’s works in the context of this study, he was also author of widely-read accounts of Japanese art, flower arrangement, history and civilisation, foreign relations, and three monographs on Shintô. See also A24 and CC1.