What is This, Please?

It is still using older version of kanji that have since become archaic in modern Japanese. Notable the kuni is ??as opposed to the now standardized ?.

I’ll take a stab at translating the title.
The first characters ?? mean country-wide or national. The second set ?? mean youth. The third set, and this is the one that took a little bit to look-up, is ??. This one, I am going to have to guess at that meaning. The first kanji, ??means hot or passionate. The second kanji, ? mean competition or contest. My guess is both together could mean something like “the fiery content” or “tournament” there is some leeway since a direct translation doesn’t make much sense. The last kanji ? literally means to gather or to collect, but in this context its just referring to a collection of stories.

So altogether, I would say the title of the book is a “Fiery tales of youth from the national tournament.” Yeah, not really the best translation, but that’s pretty much it. I will say this, I would imagine the old kanji was purposefully used to give it a more “ancient tales of Greece” feel.

As far as how to pronounce the title. I’d go with Zenkoku Seinen Nebben (I’m guessing, since this word was not in any dictionary I checked) Shuu.

That’s all for today’s kanji translation class.