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A review of 'The Tale of the
Genji'
translated by Royall Tyler
Dr Royall Tyler, BA Harv., MA PhD Columbia, is a former
Reader and Head of the Japan Centre in the
Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University.
The review article below, by Janice P. Nimura,
appeared in the New York Times Review of Books on 2 December
2001.
A Rigorous New Translation of 'The Tale of Genji'
A thousand years ago, during Japan's Heian period, a lady of the imperial
court wrote a prose narrative that was nothing like the Chinese-influenced
histories and poetry her contemporaries read. It was something new:
an imaginative re-creation of human entanglements meant to feel more
real than reality itself -- a novel, as we define it today. But it is
impossible to contain ''The Tale of Genji'' in the word ''novel.'' The
princes and consorts and monks and maids that Murasaki Shikibu described
may have been imaginary, but their preoccupations and the trappings
of their privileged lives were taken directly from her daily life. ''Genji,''
for centuries of Japanese readers as well as decades of Western ones,
is Heian Japan, a lost world as strange to the citizens of modern Japan
as modern Japan is to most Westerners.
The novel centers on the (largely amatory) exploits of Genji, the ''Shining
Prince,'' an illegitimate son of the emperor whose staggering physical
beauty and artistic prowess are such that even his enemies are moved
by them. Despite his aesthetic perfections, Genji is no paragon -- he
is by turns a rake, a sulk, a sentimentalist, a cad -- but he never
forgets a single one of the women (or men) he romances, and he savors
their various virtues with almost religious devotion. Between his affairs,
the narrative contains a wealth of Heian detail: the court's elaborate
hierarchy, its calendar of rituals and festivals, its cultivation of
painting and music and poetry.
Courtiers in 11th-century Japan referred to their world as ''above
the clouds,'' and indeed those closer to the earth - -- whether peasants
or provincial governors -- were invisible to them. Relieved of concern
for material well-being, these aristocrats created a society in which
beauty was the only currency. Since men and women rarely glimpsed one
another's faces, aesthetic value depended on nuance alone: the tints
of layered sleeves peeking from beneath a screen, the spray of seasonal
blossoms attached to an intricately folded letter, the elegant allusions
to nature and love in a poem. Action was far less important than mood,
and the most important mood was summed up in the Japanese word aware:
a heightened poignancy, an exalted yet melancholy sense of the transience
of beauty. ''Genji'' requires the reader to enter that mood. It is not
easy to convey to a modern audience.
Anyone who dares attempt a translation of ''Genji'' must be as much
a cultural interpreter as a linguist. Until recently, English-speaking
readers had a choice of two guides: Arthur Waley, who published the
first translation of ''Genji'' in the 1920's and 30's, and Edward Seidensticker,
who delivered the second in 1976. ''Since there is probably no such
thing as a perfect translation of a complex literary work,'' Seidensticker
wrote, ''the more translations, one would think, the better.'' If there
was any doubt in the truth of that statement, Royall Tyler has now dispelled
it. As the third of our guides, he has produced a translation that is
the perfect complement to the other two, and the most painstakingly
detailed of the three.
Waley and Seidensticker chose very different approaches to the herculean
task of translating ''Genji.'' Waley was a brilliant Renaissance man
and Bloomsbury contemporary who taught himself Chinese and Japanese
but never actually visited Asia. He was among the first to translate
its literature for general readers, and was more concerned with conveying
the spirit than the letter of the original. ''So much is inevitably
lost in translating Oriental literature,'' he is reported to have said,
''that one must give a great deal in return.'' Much of what he gave,
though delightful to read, is more ornate than what Murasaki Shikibu
actually wrote. ''When translating prose dialogue one ought to make
the characters say things that people talking English could conceivably
say,'' Waley insisted, and though this is a commendable argument for
translation as literature in its own right, it ignores the fact that
people who speak in English today have almost nothing in common with
the people speaking in ''The Tale of Genji.''
Seidensticker, emeritus professor of Japanese at Columbia University
and a noted translator of modern Japanese fiction, returned to the original
and found a drier, more ironic narrative voice, and a vision of Genji's
world that felt less like a fairyland than Waley's. He stuck closer
to the text, conveying its sparseness as well as its stateliness and
flashes of wry humor. Compare the first line of ''Genji'' in the translations
of Waley and then Seidensticker:
''At the Court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when) there was
among the many gentlewomen of the Wardrobe and Chamber one, who though
she was not of very high rank was favored far beyond all the rest.''
''In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the
emperor loved more than any of the others.''
Tyler, an American recently retired from the Australian National University,
navigates a course between his predecessors. His translation is less
baroque than Waley's, less brisk than Seidensticker's, and often better
than either: ''In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone
of no very great rank, among all His Majesty's Consorts and Intimates,
enjoyed exceptional favor.''
At its best, Tyler's ''Genji'' manages to combine crispness of language
with a rigorous faithfulness to the classical Japanese. But this rigor
can sometimes stand in the way of clarity. Heian courtiers did not address
one another by name -- that would have been insultingly direct. In the
text, characters are identified by titles (which change over time),
elaborate honorifics or even the verb forms they use. This is a nightmare
for translators, and Tyler takes the purist approach. Though the helpful
character lists he includes at the beginning of each chapter mention
the traditional sobriquets by which characters have become known to
readers (and which Waley and Seidensticker used throughout), these names
never appear in Tyler's translation. The result is an obliqueness that,
while wonderfully evocative of the original, can be difficult to follow.
There are nearly 800 31-syllable waka poems in ''Genji,'' another impossible
challenge. Heian poetry is so rich in allusive wordplay that much of
it is simply untranslatable. Waley ran the poems right into the text,
and Seidensticker set them off as couplets; neither strategy was entirely
faithful to the original, though Seidensticker's was perhaps more effective.
Tyler's solution is to present each as a single sentence broken into
two lines, and he makes his task even more difficult by preserving the
5-7-5-7-7 syllabic pattern of waka. His choice places technical accuracy
above lyrical impact -- the poems end up wordier than the originals,
which were more telegraphic in the sentiments they conveyed.
Here, for example, is Tyler's version of Genji's poem to a lady who
has eluded him, leaving her robe behind: ''Underneath this tree, where
the molting cicada shed her empty shell, / my longing still goes to
her, for all I knew her to be.'' And here is Seidensticker's: ''Beneath
a tree, a locust's empty shell. / Sadly I muse upon the shell of a lady.''
Though the success of Tyler's strategy here is debatable, his interpretation
of the poems (as well as the many obscurities in the text) is by far
the most thorough and complete. This new edition is copiously footnoted,
allowing us to appreciate puns and images Murasaki's readers would have
recognized immediately.
BECAUSE of its layers of cultural, political and literary complexity
(not to mention its length), the decision to read ''The Tale of Genji''
requires a subsequent decision about which guide to choose. To encounter
Waley's lush prose is to forget you are reading a translation -- or
even a non-Western text. He conveyed the essence of aware perhaps more
vividly than his successors, but detached the tale from its setting,
letting it float somewhere in a misty world of long ago and far away.
Seidensticker allowed his readers a clearer, more laconic view of Murasaki's
world; you still forget you are reading a translation, but not that
you are in Heian Japan.
Both Waley and Seidensticker had a vision of the work as a whole that
informed every sentence, and in some cases fidelity to the text was
sacrificed to the translator's own style. Tyler never lets his style
get in the way of his service to the original -- more than the others,
you can feel the translator at work on every page. As guides, Waley
is the most entertaining, Seidensticker the most unobtrusive, and Tyler
the most instructive. His ''Genji'' is an enormous achievement.
Janice P. Nimura is a freelance writer in New York.
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