[Proposed production] Certain Noble Plays of Japan

[Robin Whittleton]

While poking around in Gutenberg I happened on https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8094 which is a collection of four Noh plays. I’d like to produce it for SE, but I’m a little bit confused about how we might structure the authorship metadata.

The plays are listed as “chosen and finished by Ezra Pound” so I imagine we can put him down as compiler [com] and maybe editor [edt].

The book lists the source as being “from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa” so I’d assume given his background that he’s translated them in the first place.

Then for the four plays themselves, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Noh_plays has the authors as:

• Nishikigi: Zeami
• Hagoromo:  Zeami
• Kumasaka: Zenchiku
• Kagekiyo: Zeami

There‘s also an introduction by Yeats.

Any thoughts on how to proceed? Is this something that SE would want?

-Robin

[Alex Cabal]

I think these would go in a "short plays" omnibus at least for Zeami,
and also for Zenchiku if he did nohs, which I assume he did.

I don't know what "finished" means here. What exactly did Pound do here?
Are there more Fernollosa translations out there?

I think we need to do more detailed research on exactly what the
situation is here before we do anything. But working on this as a single
"Certain Noble Plays" ebook is probably not the direction we want to go in.

On 2/21/26 2:39 AM, Robin Whittleton wrote:
> While poking around in Gutenberg I happened on https://

> www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8094 <https://www.gutenberg.org/
> ebooks/8094> which is a collection of four Noh plays. I’d like to

> produce it for SE, but I’m a little bit confused about how we might
> structure the authorship metadata.
>
> The plays are listed as “chosen and finished by Ezra Pound” so I imagine
> we can put him down as compiler [com] and maybe editor [edt].
>
> The book lists the source as being “from the manuscripts of Ernest
> Fenollosa” so I’d assume given his background that he’s translated them
> in the first place.
>
> Then for the four plays themselves, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

> List_of_Noh_plays <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Noh_plays> has
> the authors as:
>
> * Nishikigi: Zeami <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeami_Motokiyo>
> * Hagoromo: Zeami <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeami_Motokiyo>
> * Kumasaka: Zenchiku <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konparu_Zenchiku>
> * Kagekiyo: Zeami <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeami_Motokiyo>

>
>
> There‘s also an introduction by Yeats.
>
> Any thoughts on how to proceed? Is this something that SE would want?
>
> -Robin
>

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[Robin Whittleton]

After a bit more searching I found https://archive.org/details/nohoraccomplishm00feno that has a few more plays in a collaboration between Fernollosa and Pound. In it Ezra Pound describes himself as ”someone who has but the pleasure of arranging beauty into the words”. So a small collection of Zeami Motokiyo plays, as translated by Fenollosa and Pound? From those two books we get:

• Nishikigi
• Hagoromo
• Kagekiyo
• Kakitsubata

I’m not finding anything else for “Zeami” or “Motokiyo” (his given name) or “Kanze” (another surname reading).

All in that comes to ~8K words, so that would be a very short SE production. Maybe it’s better to leave this.

-Robin

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