OKIBON SHINKOKINSHŪ – L’ULTIMA REVISIONE DEL TESSUTO ANTOLOGICO AD OPERA DI GO-TOBA

During his exile on the Oki island, the retired emperor Go-Toba reviewed once again his masterpiece, the Shinkokinwakashū. At the end of the revision, four hundred lyrics had been removed from the anthology, so that the new-born text, nowadays known as Okibon Shinkokinwakashū, ended up to be quite different from the beautiful copy Minamoto no Ienaga had made in the capital in 1216. In this paper, moving from the afterword Go-Toba added to the Okibon, I will try to define some aesthetic criteria the ex-emperor could have used in the selection of the lyrics to be removed. The analysis is based on what is called the Junsui Okibon Shinkokinwakashū, a manuscript discovered in 1995 in the well-known Reizeike shiguretei bunkozō, which is the oldest copy of the Okibon we have, and for this reason the most reliable one.