Our Common Understanding, for Earl Miner

Abstract

Always with a sense of ‘we’; that’s how I remember Earl Miner. Now, with him gone for more than five years, that ‘we’ is shot through with genial images as well as a feeling of loss. But the ‘we’ that Miner opened up to me came initially much more with a sense of a common struggle toward understanding. That would be a platitude – ‘struggle toward understanding’ – and rather grandiose for what I intend, so perhaps I should put it in more elementary terms: it was in the dissection and decipherment of Japanese poetry, as part of a class of grad students and senior concentrators, that I first came to know him. We would sit in his office in the English Department for a three-hour seminar, working our way deliberately, not quickly, through a selection of classic Japanese poems. These were waka. The word means literally, ‘Japanese song’, but in most cases it refers to the short form (in lines of 5–7–5–7 and 7 syllables) that grew up around the seventh century, to become the preferred vehicle for poetic expression in Japan’s classic age and early medieval period. The more familiar, and even shorter haiku, is much indebted to the aesthetics of waka, but belongs to a later age and a different sort of society. Waka, for their part, were the poems of witty aristocrats and, eventually, of legendary samurai. They had great prestige in early Japan and continued, in the early days of Japanese Studies in the US, to be