Japanese love poem

Here, is for you a little Japanese (Tokyo ben) love poem （愛の詩, 日本の愛の詩）. Your beauty is Japanese and your charms are nippon. You are more valuable than a diamond and your look by saying "愛 し て る 」」" always turns to the West. My Japanese poem, though in such pretty ideograms, does not have the grace of the one to whom it is addressed. This Japanese woman, can be only defined in the universal language, that which all men understand, and which is called "beauty" .

Will I really be able to translate her?

Japanese (autonym : 日本語) is the sixth most spoken language in the world. Only Japan and a small diaspora speak Japanese, a language, which because Japan is an island, has remained quite isolated.

Highland country with many islands, Japan has all the features favoring the dialectal variations. Very often they are just unintelligible, yet linguistically, for the written as for the oral, Japan is perfectly standardized.

In Japan each region has its dialect (ben) and it is the Tokyo-ben that corresponds to the standard Japanese, in total 130 million people speak it.

Linguists have not been able to establish links with any other language. Even if Japanese from the 3rd century AD adopted Chinese characters, it's not, in any way, related to Chinese. Only one link seems to be proven, the link between Japanese and Ryukyuan (Okinawa).

For Japanese as for the languages of Southeast Asia, there is a very important loan to the Chinese language, since it is considered that each of the languages of this region has more than 50% of Chinese words in its lexicon. And nowadays English vocabulary tends to replace non-Chinese loans (Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch).

In terms of writing, the Japanese language is written with two types of sign, the kanjis (for nouns, verbs etc.) and the kanas (syllabic characters, for suffixes particles, conjunctions). There are two types of Kanas: the hiraganas for general use and the katakana fo the foreign words. Kanjis are Chinese characters, and rōmajis are Latin letters.

The land of the rising sun, although at the forefront of economic modernity has preserved its ancestral traditions. Even if officially Japanese does not have the status of official language, informally, of course, it is!

The first Japanese poems were collected in kojiki and nihon-shoki or nihongi in the 1st century and are close to the manyo-shu poems revealing the talent of poets such as Otomo no Yakamochi and Kakinomoto no Hitomaro. Written in Japanese the preambles become the uta-nikki (poetic journals) or uta-monogatari (poetic narratives). The form of the poems is already fixed, alternate lines not rhymed.

It is the court ladies who first illustrate the Japanese language. The first nikki is the work of a high-ranking poet, Ki no Tsurayuki, who compiles a poetic anthology Kokin-waka-shu (a collection of yesteryear and earlier poems), the preface of which is the oldest poetic art of the Waka (Japanese poem).

In the 11th century, the Genji-monogatari of Murasaki Shikibu, and the Murasaki Shikibu of Si Shonagon, creator of the zuihitsu genus, are two masterpieces of the world literature. The 12-13th century epics, will provide innumerable subjects, in parallel to the classical waka, is developed the "chained poem" (kusari-renga) fashion, composed in turn by turn by several poets. This game spreads throughout the society and the use of keeping from the chains, only the best hokku, made it possible to preserve these haiku as a form of complete expression in itself.

In the 17th century, literature covers all subjects, the master of poetry is Basho, founder of a haiku school.

In 19-20th century it is the introduction of the Western culture, the poet Kitamura Tokoku rises against the romanticism of Tsubouchi. The novel becomes the favorite weapon of writers, including: Mori Ogai, Soseki, Shiga Naoya, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Kawabata Yasunari (nobel prize), Tanizaki Junichiro.

After 1945 the authors testify of the confrontational encounter with the West, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Murakami Ryu. In poetry the influence of Western forms is felt with the Japanese poets: Takamura Kotaro, Muro Saisei, Miki Rofu, Hinatsu Konosuke and Sato Haruo. Tsukamoto Kunio and Yamagushi Sishi continue to cultivate traditional forms. But many young poets cling to free verse, including Yoshioka Minoru a surrealist poet. The poets begin to work on the graphic possibilities and to recover the thickness of time, proper to the haiku, these poets include Ishii Yutaka, Iwata Hiroshi, Niikuni Seiichi, Tamura Ryuichi and Tanikawa Shuntaro.