D. Sources of Influence and Transmission

27. Miyamori, Asatarô. Works 1926~36.

		In the decade before the Pacific War Miyamori shaped popular perception of the classical Japanese tradition. Compilations of his work remain in print in modern mass-market editions.

Miyamori’s Anthology of Haiku, Ancient and Modern (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1932) and Masterpieces of Japanese Poetry, Ancient and Modern (2 vols., Maruzen, 1936) include detailed explanations of Japanese verse tradition and taken together well over two thousand poems, each presented in Japanese, romanised Japanese, and rhymed metrical English. Both works are reviewed by Blunden (BD39, 47), and Blunden’s only attempt at presenting his own versions of haiku (BD110) draws extensively but without acknowledgement on Miyamori’s renderings of the same poems. Finneran suggests that the Anthology, particularly a poem by ‘Gekkyo’ (p. 487), is the source of Yeats’s Imitated from the Japanese (see BL41a). Miyamori’s earlier translation, Masterpieces of Chikamatsu [Ap], the Japanese Shakespeare (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926) was prepared with help from Robert Nichols (Ap).