Teleidoscope

Thu, Mar 08, 2007

Translations of Genji

Posted at 9:53 pm MST to Media

There are three major translation of the Tale of Genji.

The Waley translation was the first one and brought tale to the attention of the English-speaking world, but it was not particularly faithful to the original. It was published in 1926-1933. The story was restructured to fit western ideas of story arcs, and the translator may have taken too much advantage of Heian subtlety in dealing with a story that is basically about sexual and political intrigue. Waley's Genji has been described as too much of an Edwardian gentleman.

Seidensticker (1976) makes much more of an attempt to reflect the original text and culture without adding whole scenes or watering down the sexual side of the political intrigue. Everything is still very subtle and oblique, of course (Heian society was oblique, and the style of Genji is small-clique gossip,where nothing needs to be said directly because everyone knows everyone else). But at least the story is all there and in the right order.

Royall Tyler's translation is even newer (2001), very faithful. I think it was based partly on more recently discovered manuscripts or old commentaries, but I may be misremembering. It has excellent footnotes and
appendices on the cultural stuff, which can be important when all of the characters are referred to only by nicknames and titles which change over time.

I like Tyler's prose better, though I may be prejudiced: he translated some wonderful stories about the Kasuga Deity that I'm very fond of, and some old Japanese collections of tales. (The Japanese attitude toward the supernatural is in some ways very similar to and
in other ways very different from Europeans in the same period). Seidensticker's prose can be a little dry.

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