The Tale of Genji and Its Translation

The Tale of Genji (or Genji Monogatari) is a classic work of Japanese literature written in the early 11th century by the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu. The work recounts the fictional life of Hikaru Genji, or "Radiant Prince", who is the son of an ancient Japanese emperor (known to readers as Emperor Kiritsubo) and a low-ranking concubine called Kiritsubo Consort. Due to the intense political conflicts at the court and out of protection for his son,  the emperor removes Genji from the line of succession, demoting him to a commoner by giving him the surname Minamoto, so that he pursue a career as an imperial officer. The tale concentrates on Genji's romantic life and describes the customs of the aristocratic society of the time. With us today is Prof. Edward Kamens, Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Prof. Kamens will share his expertise on the history of the work’s translations as well as how other modes of  interpretation shape  our understanding of the work.

Reading List:
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji 

Edward Kamens, "Flares in the Garden,Darkness in the Heart: Exteriority, Interiority, and the Role of Poems in The Tale of Genji," in Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan 

For aficionados interested in Japanese versions:
Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei
Shin Nihon koten bungaku zenshu

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Transcript

C: The Tale of Genji (or Genji Monogatāri) is a classic work of Japanese literature written in the early 11th century by the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murāsaki Shikību. The work recounts the fictional life of Hikaru Genji, or "Radiant Prince", who is the son of an ancient Japanese emperor (known to readers as Emperor Kirītsubo) and a low-ranking concubine called Kiritsubo Consort. Due to the intense political conflicts at the court and out of protection for his son,  the emperor removes Genji from the line of succession, demoting him to a commoner by giving him the surname Mināmoto, so that he pursues a career as an imperial officer. The tale concentrates on Genji's romantic life and describes the customs of the aristocratic society of the time. With us today is Prof. Edward Kamens, Sumītomo Professor of Japanese Studies, East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Prof. Kamens will share his expertise on the history of the work’s translations as well as how other modes of  interpretation shape  our understanding of the work.

C:  Thank you for coming to the show Prof. Kamens, to share your expertise on The Tale of Genji with our global audience. Can you briefly tell our audience about your relationship with the work?

E: Hello, Claire.  I’m happy to be talking about The Tale of Genji with you and others joining us whether to learn about it for the first time or to learn more about it if it is already part of their experience. I’m approaching the end of my active teaching years but this is a literary work that I have been engaged with in one way or another for close to fifty years.  In fact my first encounter with The Tale of Genji in translation, in a college course I took as a first-year undergraduate,  was really the single most important thing that set me on a path to scholarship and teaching in the area of classical or what we call “pre-modern” Japanese literature. And it’s been right there at the core of my research interests and of course central to much of my teaching–right along with all the issues we think about in connection to “world literature,” which is so utterly dependent on translation. So I’m glad we can talk about all these things in relationship to one another.

C: Can you shed some light on the background of the author, especially on her literary training in Chinese literature and how this training influenced her rhetoric and narrative strategies , regarding the cross-cultural transmissions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and the aesthetics of Tang Poetry to Japan? 

E: We sure wish we knew more about her—we don’t really even know her name, since “Murasaki Shikibu” is a kind of sobriquet that combines the name of a central character in her tale, “Murasaki,” and a court title that means something like “Secretary” and that was just of one of the appellations used in place of personal names in court society. Most of what we know about her is derived from a fragmentary diary that is taken to be her own, and in which, among other things, we can read her own description about how she eavesdropped when her father, a middle-ranking courtier from a not undistinguished lineage of scholar/poets, was giving her brother instruction in the Chinese classics, and her confession that she was a better student than he, even if a secret one–since that kind of education was not normally part of a woman’s training for service in the court.  The diary is also where we read a famous episode in which she tells how her employer at court,  the Empress Shōshi, asked her, again in secret, to instruct her in the reading of the collected works of the Tang Chinese poet Bai Juyi.  This sheds light to some extent on the way that she then weaves allusions and quotations from his famous poems into the text of the Tale right from its opening pages.  But there is so much else that she weaves into it that we would overlook a lot if we just focused on the evidence of her familiarity with Tang poetry or the teachings of Confucius or Buddha;  those are there in various forms, but there is so much else that went into the making of this monogatari.

C: Right. Let’s talk about what “monogatāri”(物語) is and how does the concept converge with and differ from other genres of fiction? Are we justified in thinking of this work as the first novel as it has been said to be? 

E: The word monogatari literally means “talk about things,” and among other things that term for a work of narrative fiction suggests, as many scholars have also shown, that the genre had oral, story-telling and performing aspects in its origin and development and retained them right through the time that Murasaki Shikibu wrote this Tale:  we have more than one scene in it that describes a monogatari being read out loud–almost always, as it happens, by and for women. So one thing to keep in mind is that in some senses the genre is gendered–but we know that men were also among the avid readers of The Tale of Genji even from the time that Mursaki Shikibu was producing it. 

The scholarly consensus today is that there are all kinds of ways to talk about what is novelistic in The Tale of Genji–that is, features of its style, its relationship to and containment of various kinds of discourse, or heteroglossia, as Bakhtin called it, and what we think of as psychological insights revealed through shifting modes of  the representation of emotional interiorities.  At the same time, since the term, concept and genre of “the novel”--if we think of it as an early modern European phenomenon–obviously  would not have been known to Murasaki Shikibu and other authors of works like it–of which there are also several sub-genres–it can seem a bit misleading to insist on calling it “the first novel” or even a “novel” as such.  I’m sure there are many scholars of many literatures and of world literatures who can point to novelistic aspects of many texts that pre-date the early 11th century and would contest that claim.  What matters not so much is “first-ness” but the qualities in the work that have made it matter to so many readers for so long, now, in the contemporary world, in multiplying languages and media.

C: In what ways should we approach The Tale of Genji within the framework of “world literature” ?

E:  We could spend quite a bit of our time trying  to settle on a definition of “world literature”--right?  In this case I think we can simply agree that the Tale of Genji’s place in “world literature” is a fait accompli and that  this is the result of its enduring central status as a landmark of Japanese literature that has been “worlded” or “globalized” through translation.  Of course here “translation” can mean several things.  For modern and contemporary readers in Japan, it has been made accessible through a series of translations from the original classical into modern Japanese; the difference, –roughly, to oversimplify just a bit,  is something like the relationship of Old English to modern English, or classical Latin to Medieval Latin and onward from those Latins to the various Romance languages.  And then there’s the long history of monogatari such as the Tale of Genji–and especially it–being “translated” into other media: works of pictorial art produced with it, probably from the get-go in the 11th century, then into many visual forms–painting, prints, and onward up to the present day in cinema, manga, anime, and so forth.  And as with many so-called “classics” there are parodies, updates and all manner of spin-offs, too.   But if we were to agree that the enabling of world-wide access through translation into multiple languages is a sine-qua-non for any particular work’s inclusion in and recognition as “world literature,” then The Tale of Genji arrived there quite a while ago–perhaps not before Goethe first started talking about welt-litteratur, but certainly before it became a keyword in scholarship and teaching in the way we practice it today.

C: One of the highlights of world literature, according to David Damrosch in his 2003 book called What is World Literature , is its nuanced and localized cosmopolitanism. This observation jibes with a philosophical perspective that you have proposed in reading the Tale in your essay “Flares in the Garden,Darkness in the Heart: Exteriority, Interiority, and the Role of Poems in The Tale of Genji,” which is a chapter of the essay collection called Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji: Philosophical Perspectives, published in 2019. 

             In this essay, you proposed an alternating interchangeable perspective as a mode of reading The Tale of Genji. You drew an analogy to the genre of painted screens of early modern  Kyōto called “inside-and-outside of the Capital,” to propose a method of interpreting the work. In particular, you advised readers to imagine the painter who delineated these panoramic views purely out of imagination and perhaps also based on his memories. And by doing this, you propose to think about the interchangeable relationship between inside and outside points of view and perspectives, as well as the parts and wholes, especially the parts that are poems, for example, that can radiate to a larger, panoramic picture of the ethos that the Tale of Genji embodies. The suggestion of your proposal is that Tale of Genji possesses this novelistic capacity to draw the reader into an imaginary world that they can examine and experience as if before their eyes, but also, in a way to see into the heart and minds of its characters, too. Am I right to think of your interpretation this way?

E: Sure, that’s fine.  The enabling of a  reader’s perception of a text’s capacity to sustain the illusion of having entered into a fictional character’s psyche, or inner world, is regarded by many as a hallmark of “the novelistic.” The Tale of Genji does this in a number of ways;  its narrator gets right inside protagonists’ heads and reveals what they’re thinking;  often those thoughts take the form of poems–which are something the text is full of, some written as communications, some uttered in conversation, but many that are never other than internal–in “the mind’s mouth,” as it were.  At the same time, the Tale has seemingly  magical powers in its conjuring of imaginary places and spaces, so that’s another set of exteriors–urban neighborhoods high and low, palace grounds, sea roads, mountain paths– and interiors– the spaces inside those palaces, villas, monasteries, and their gardens.  The first part of the title of the article you mentioned refers to a poetic figure that serves as a chapter title–flares set on a summer night to illuminate a garden in one of Genji’s mansions, and those flares also serve Genji in a poem he utters as a figure for his own inner burning passions;  the second part, “Darkness in the Heart,” is another figure that surfaces repeatedly in the tale in a variety of contexts, all having to do with inner emotional turmoil.  So here again is the oscillation between exterior and interior–part of the author’s masterful orchestration of her poetic materials, which she turns into the stuff of the tale.  By the way, in another essay recently published in Japanese, I made a point of discussing this Japanese poetic figure, “darkness in or of the heart” alongside Conrad’s very different “Heart of Darkness.”  There my point was in fact to show what happens, for scholars and readers, once we do in fact treat The Tale of Genji not just as a masterpiece of Japanese culture but as part of “world literature.”

C:  Perhaps we’ll see that translated into English one of these days.  Meanwhile: Your essay on “interiority and exteriority” also discusses intertextuality as one aspect of the work the text does to produce the readers sense of being both “inside” and outside the text,” and you focus particularly on poems and their intertextual aspects in that part of our argument.  Could you share more about that?

E: Classical Japanese poetry functions as a vast intertextual network or matrix; given its penchant and the value placed on artful allusive gesture from one poem to another, or a memorable or evocative phrase or figure prominent in one or usually lots more poems, as well as the consistent use of a single short form for the Japanese poem in five phrases with a total of 31 beats, one can pretty much say, without exaggeration, that in a sense every Japanese poem alludes to every other.  But intertext is of course more than allusion.  The author of the Tale works brilliantly with this matrix in the poems she weaves into the Tale, but she does more than that:  there are whole chapters that are built through  the way they engage with specific poetic figures that she draws out of this matrix–whether it’s the scent of orange blossoms or the first warber in springtime or a small boat drifting rudderless through troubled waters. This works as “intertextuality” because many readers could and can feel the resonances she creates with her elaborations of these figures–and even if the reader can’t recognize the references, they get a strong sense that these figures are familiar and redolent of their previous use.  (And of course our translators provide us with helpful notes to guide us if we’re not already in on what’s going on.)  So this is another way that the text operates on the registers of interior and exterior, which finally merge:  as Jacques Derrida said, “there is nothing that is outside the text,” in that it draws so much into its interior from all around it–in this particular case, from this matrix of rich, resonant poetic material.  I like to say that The Tale of Genji is a house of and for poems:  it exists in part because it can be made out of the stuff of other poems and then offers a space for all the new ones with which it author furnishes it. 

C: Earlier, you reminded us that  The Tale of Genji’s status as “world literature” was achieved at least in part through its translations. I understand that, of those available in English you have a preference for Dennis Washburn’s.   I’m sure his   Norton Critical Edition of 2021, which includes translations of some key texts of traditional commentary on the work plus eight new critical essays, will  help many readers to understand it better. Can you tell us what are the reasons for your  recommendation and what we can learn from the long history of translation of this Tale inside and outside of Japan? 

E: As far as my preference for teaching and citation in English is concerned, a lot of this has to do with the way that the poetry and poetics of the text are handled.  The first sort-of complete translation was Arthur Waley’s. He was a brilliant, largely self-trained translator of both Chinese and Japanese literature; he had access to the most important 18th and 19th century annotated Japanese editions of the text, and that gave much of what he did a strong measure of authenticity. Virginia Woolf, among others, was really taken by the work through Waley’s rendition–she wrote a fascinating review of it for London Vogue in 1925. (They were Bloomsbury-circle  friends–sort of.) And here’s something that reminds us how expectations for accuracy in translation or so-called “allegiance to the text” have changed over time.  Waley once told an interviewer that when translating, he would read through a passage, then put the book in Chinese or Japanese aside or close it, and then write down his English version without looking back at the source text.  Also,  for reasons of his own,  Waley treated the poems in the Tale–which as I have suggested are integral,  irreducible parts of it–as prose, undifferentiated from the narrative, making them indistinguishable as poems, as such.  Edward Seidensticker, in the 1970’s, set them off from the prose, to that extent giving them their due as a recognizable element of the text, as it should be.  As with his prose, his poem translations tend to be on the terse side; some of their nuances and overtones can get lost. So I think he kind of under-sells them.  I recently came across something interesting about that;  in the 2003 print  edition of the Reference Guide to World Literature–given the date, a publication that would seem to have ridden one of the high tides of the rise of “world literature” as a field of study and teaching on its own–Seidensticker’s entry, on Murasaki Shikibu and the Tale, makes not a single mention of its poems, or of Japanese poetry or the poetics that are so important to its conception and affect. With all due respect, I think  this may suggest his relative lack of interest in the Tale’s poems and poetry, and I think that’s reflected in his translation–despite the fact that he certainly understood their complex working.   That’s much less the case with Royall Tyler’s very thoughtful, scholarly 2001 version.  But it has its quirks–and when I used it for teaching, various things about it often seemed to baffle students rather than engaging them.  Now, in full disclosure:  Dennis Washburn was  in graduate seminars with me when I first started teaching at Yale, so we’ve had a long association, and I tracked his progress during the long period during which he was working on his version.  I like the choices he makes, the solutions he finds as a translator in rendering what is sometimes almost if not really untranslatable; he makes the text accessible without selling it short or keeping it on a pedestal; so it’s engaging.  It just works–or at least, it does for me. 

C: Can you tell our readers who can read Japanese the versions or editions that Dennis Washburn used to translate? I’ve been reading Genji with two versions laid side by side on my desktop because I feel the need to go back to hear the original narratorial voice of the story-teller. And by doing this, I am also acknowledging the losses alongside the gains in the process of translation.  The modern version I am using is some electronic version circulated on the internet that was translated into modern Japanese  by Akīko Yōsano early in the 20th century.   Are there modern Japanese print editions available to readers outside Japan?

E: Of course.  Washburn consulted several currently in-print annotated editions of the text: they are available in two major multi-volume collections of the national classics–rather like the Library of America– that have very similar titles:  in Japanese, the Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei and the Shin Nihon koten bungaku zenshu. You can find these in most East Asian libraries in this country, purchase on-line, or access as e-books if your library has the right subscriptions. You mentioned Yosano Akiko’s translation:  she was the first of a number of important writers and others who have created versions of the Tale in contemporary vernaculars. Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, a novelist whose produced several works that have themselves come close to “world literature” status, produced three versions before and during the Pacific War years:  his well-known novel Sasameyuki, or The Makioka Sisters, as translated by Edward Seidensticker, is said to be full of echoes and shadows of The Tale of Genji, because Tanizaki was so absorbed with it while writing the novel.  It’s good to read them side by side or in succession. Maybe that’s why I’d have to say it’s probably my favorite modern Japanese novel.

C: Before we end this episode, can you share some final tips on the work for first-timers and professionals alike?

E: I’d be happy to. First: don’t expect it to be a page-turner, even though there are a few episodes that are rather like bodice-rippers.  It’s a big, long book that was meant to absorb surplus time if you have any.  It really was intended to divert and entertain its readers, and it still does. Indeed, in a scene in which the nature and value of monogatari are themselves under discussion by characters within the tale, we learn that literature of this kind is understood to be escapist and useful in filling leisure time;  but at the same time, that  it’s full of moments that move us, and many that approach a kind of verisimilitude in that the reader says to themselves “Yes! Wow!  That’s how it could be.” (ge ni, sa mo aramu.) It’s set in a fictional, remote, and for many a very strange world, but still it has this power–and thanks to translation almost anyone can access and experience that.   So: The Tale of Genji certainly has a place in any conception of “world literature,” but beyond that:  if you care about literature and cherish your experiences with it and thirst for new ones , it belongs on your shelf, or on your bedside table, and once there it will become a part of you, I’m sure.

C: Thank you so much Prof. Kamens for a wonderful talk and thank you so much for sharing with us your wisdom along with your own scholarly adventure with the work.

E: Thank you, Claire.