Shinpen kokka taikan no. | 4 |
Heian-chō uta’awase taisei no. | 5 |
Title | 寛平御時后宮歌合 |
Romanised Title | Kanpyō no ōntoki kisai no miya uta’awase |
Translated Title | Poetry Contest held by the Empress Dowager during the Reign of the Kanpyō Emperor |
Alternative Title(s) | 皇太夫人班子女王歌合 Kōtai fujin hanshi jō uta’wase (‘Poetry Contest held by Princess Nakako, the Empress Dowager’) |
Date | Autumn, before 9/Kanpyō 5 [10.893] |
Extant Poems | 193 |
Sponsor | Princess Nakako (Hanshi) 班子女王 |
Identifiable Participants | Ki no Tomonori 紀友則; Minamoto no Masazumi 源当純; Sosei 素性; Fujiwara no Okikaze 藤原興風; (Ki no) Tsurayuki 貫之; Ki no Akimine 紀秋岑; Ariwara no Muneyana 在原棟梁 (850-898); Ono no Yoshiki 小野美材 (?-902); 大江千里; Fujiwara no Sugane 藤原菅根 (856-908); (Ōshikōchi no) Mitsune 躬恒; (Mibu no) Tadamine 忠岑; (Sakanoue no) Korenori 是則 (?-930); (Fujiwara no) Toshiyuki 敏行; Sugano no Tadaōmu 菅野忠臣; Minamoto no Muneyuki 源宗于 (?-940); Ise 伊勢 (872?-938?) |
Judgements | N |
Topics | Spring; Summer; Autumn; Winter; Love |
This competition was a large-scale event conducted to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Empress Dowager Nakako (Hanshi) (833-900), the mother of Emperor Uda. While she was formally the sponsor of the contest, it seems likely that it was her son who arranged it on her behalf. The competition seems to have orginally consisted of one hundred rounds, not all of which survive, broadly organised into poems on the four seasons and love. As there are no records of the performance of this event, and there are no other instances of such large events taking place at this period in uta’awase development, the consensus is that it, too, was a senka awase, like Prince Koresada’s earlier contest. Extant texts of the competition do not record the poets’ names but, in a further similarity to Koresada’s contest, many of the poems made their way into other anthologies and it is from these that some of the participants’ identities have been discovered. See below for a list of these.
Kokinshū
Gosenshū
Shinkokinshū
Shinchokusenshū
II: 88 III: 152 | V: 281 V: 298 | XII: 708/710 |
Shingosenshū
I: 14 IV: 214/205 | VII: 429/421 XI: 640/632 | XIV: 864/860 XVI: 1058/1055 |
Shinshūishū
III: 303