[Book Review] A review of 'The Tale of the Genji' translated by Royall Tyler

Abstract

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... 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.