The Poetics of Waka:

A Philosophy of the Actual

Abstract

The article proposes an inquiry on the philosophical potential of the classical Japanese poetry known as waka. The most striking formal aspect of the waka is its short structure, usually composed of 31 moraic syllables divided, respectively, into 5 verses of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables each. To succeed as a poetic form, waka employs the rhythmic feature of pause and a kind of rhetoric that associate each poem to the whole of tradition through precedents. We argue that there is a philosophy of the real – we call it the intertextuality of the real – in the intellectual tradition constituted by waka that understands reality as empty and impermanent. Thus, waka would be the most appropriate way to express the real because it is more profound and excellent as far as it creates a movement of emptying and making impermanent through its formal and rhetorical resources: its core, disposition, and meaning (our translations of the Japanese term “kokoro”) and its words (“kotoba”).