When Poetry Mattered

“The Tale of Genji’ is long, and it is never in a hurry,” wrote Royall Tyler in an article published several years ago while he was working on his new translation of this Japanese classic. Eagerly anticipated by fans of Japanese literature, this handsome 1,200-page two-volume edition is long indeed, and one must not expect to hurry through it.

Approaching “The Tale of Genji” requires a different frame of mind from that of modern readers primed to devour six books in as many days on a beach vacation. The “Genji” is one of those works that can be read and reread throughout one’s life, each reading revealing something unseen.

“The Tale of Genji” is the great classic of Japanese literature. It was written 1,000 years ago by a lady of lower aristocratic birth who was put into service to a young empress--some think in order to entice the emperor to a salon where interesting stories could be found. This period of Japanese history, the Heian era (794-1185), was an age of aristocratic indulgence quite unlike the succeeding centuries of shoguns, samurai and geisha, who give us a more swashbuckling version of old Japan. In Heian courtly society, where aesthetic considerations were paramount, men as well as women freely wept into their wide sleeves, and a person’s skill in rendering his or her emotions into a 31-syllable poem garnered the highest regard. This lost world has remained vivid for a millennium largely because of Murasaki Shikibu’s writings about the adventures of her hero, Prince Genji, and his many loves. Ladies perfumed their robes with incense blends of their own devising, choosing the colors to match the season. Gentlemen snapped off graceful maple twigs to attach to the morning-after letters that etiquette demanded as postlude to discreet liaisons. Poetry mattered. Never before or since have art and life been so exquisitely combined.

On account of his numerous affairs, the fictional Genji has sometimes been compared to the ur -womanizer Don Juan, and Japanese moralists and some Western interpreters have judged the tale a licentious work. This is a mistake. Erotic, yes; humorous, often; ribald, occasionally; licentious, never. Genji’s pursuit of women may have been driven by erotic desire and curiosity while he was young, but it was always tempered by sincerity. For his original female readership, radiant Genji was the ideal man: beautiful, sensitive, educated. Such was the genius of his creator that even the modern reader believes in Genji’s utter desirability, quite a feat when one stops to think how wholly different the pale, plump-faced Genji is from the Western image of a sexy male.

Becoming engrossed in, or occasionally indignant at, Genji’s romantic activity, the reader may be drawn up when suddenly the author steps out of her tale to offer an aside on Genji’s doings. One can easily imagine Murasaki reading her tale to a group of ladies and looking up from the page to comment. This is a strikingly effective authorial device: We feel Murasaki whispering conspiratorially in our ears just as we are about to judge the impetuous young man. Eventually Genji grows up, and he disappears from the tale about two-thirds of the way through. The last third of the story concerns the next generation, a bevy of Genji’s less-than-radiant descendants. The different tone of these later chapters has been remarked on for centuries. Some scholars have questioned whether another author may have taken over the writing at some point.

If one imagines (as I think is plausible) that Murasaki began writing tales of her handsome prince when she was young and continued to develop them throughout her writing life, it makes sense to think that what she wrote in her 40s would naturally be different from what she wrote in her teens. We know from the surviving fragments of her diary that Murasaki felt ambivalent about her life at court, and it’s not hard to imagine that her experiences there could have turned the tenor of her writing away from the perfection of Prince Genji to a darker view of human psychology.

“The Tale of Genji” seems to have been appreciated as an extraordinary work right from the start. It garnered a position at court for its author, and its readership continued to expand after her death. We know of at least one young lady, the nameless author of the “Sarashina Diary,” who was so overjoyed to receive a full set of all the Genji tales that she holed up in her room to read them day and night. Copies were done by hand and passed from reader to reader for centuries. Murasaki was alternately worshiped as a saint or denounced as a sinner by the Buddhist clergy, depending on their interpretation of her fiction.

“The Tale of Genji” stepped onto the stage of world literature in the late 1920s with the appearance of Arthur Waley’s self-consciously literary translation into English. Members of the Bloomsbury group, among others, were utterly bewitched by the cult of beauty and the exquisite sensitivities of these Japanese courtiers depicted by a female author, no less. Murasaki held tremendous interest and inspiration for writers like Virginia Woolf, concerned with the issue of a woman’s literary voice. Just a generation after the topsy-turvy of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado,” the great achievement of Waley’s translation was to convey Genji’s world as both highly exotic and deeply interior. For the first time non-Japanese readers could see that Lady Murasaki, as Waley called her, was an extraordinarily skillful author. Though her setting was the royal Japanese court of 1,000 years ago, her characters managed to draw the reader into their passions and terrors in an uncannily modern way. As a genre, the novel would not be born in the West for many centuries, yet here was the 11th-century “Tale of Genji” with its psychological insights, its conflicted heroes and antiheroes, its layered images, symbolic resonances and realistic dialogue. The language of Waley’s “Genji” now feels rather mannered in tone, but the translation nevertheless managed to paint the broad outlines of this magnificent work of fiction from classical Japanese that is all but inaccessible to modern readers.

In fact nearly everyone, even Japanese, wishing to read “The Tale of Genji” today will read it in modern translation. Tyler himself once commented, “‘The Tale of Genji’ is known not only for the beauty but for the difficulty of its language. Genuinely to read (rather than decipher) its text is beyond someone like me, and that is one reason why I am now translating it in my turn. Perhaps if I could read ‘Genji’ better, I might be less keen to turn it into English and find out what it says.” We are fortunate that Tyler’s curiosity carried him through this monumental undertaking, for we can all share his beautifully readable version of what the tale is about.

A good gauge of what makes a work a classic may be the number of times it is translated, not only the number of foreign languages in which it appears but the number of new translations into the same languages. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” inspired at least eight major renditions into English in the 20th century alone. In Japan, the “Genji” has had at least this many. Novelist Juni’ichiro Tanizaki did it twice, and Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata was working on his own version when he died in 1972. The most recent, a 10-volume edition completed three years ago by the novelist-turned-Buddhist nun Setouchi Jakuch{omacronl}, has sold more than a million sets in Japan. Waley’s English “Genji” was succeeded by Edward Seidensticker’s more scholarly and far more complete version in 1976. The success of the Seidensticker version, in turn, can be attributed to both the translator’s skill and to the simple fact that the more widely a great work becomes known, the more readers want to know about it. Tyler has completed the first major “Genji” translation of the 21st century, and it sets a new standard.

The fact that “The Tale of Genji” has continued to be read shows that there is a great element of universal appeal in Murasaki’s work. Still, modern readers need some help to understand the things that would have delighted her contemporaries. The author left much unspoken. For example, a few words could call to mind a classic poem her readers would all immediately have recognized. Few of us can do this, but with Tyler’s helpful notes, we can get a sense of how subtle Murasaki’s writing was and of how people used natural images in poetry to communicate emotional and social messages. When a handsome courtier “sang low, beating time and sounding just like a bell cricket,” Tyler whispers in a note that the image implies that his voice was sweet and pure. When a randy elderly lady-in-waiting slips Genji a fan with a line from a poem “old is the grass beneath the trees,” we need to know that the poem continues, “no steed crops it, no one comes to mow” and that these images indicate that the faded lady is brazenly flirting with the young buck.

It is important to keep in mind that “The Tale of Genji” grew as a series of stories that were meant to be read aloud, accompanied by pictures. Eventually the episodes were incorporated into a larger narrative framework. Later readers’ perceptions have also become part of the tale as we know it. The names of familiar female characters, such as Genji’s first wife, Aoi, the Safflower Lady, Tamakazura and his great love, Murasaki, are all sobriquets derived from particular poems that have come to define each character in readers’ minds. The same goes for the names of each of the 54 chapters. Tyler orients the reader to all these connections. Although most of us will never read the original, we can get a sense from this translation of how its imagery and characters were understood in their day and how Murasaki’s tale formed a deep wellspring for writers and artists who came after her.

Tyler is also careful to reflect Murasaki’s own concerns. He has gone to great lengths to take seriously the overriding Heian preoccupation with social rank, for example. This is something that absolutely infuses “Genji’s” world. In the original “Genji,” characters were referred to by changing titles as they moved up in the world, yet previous translators always settled on one name to use throughout. I would not have thought it possible to reflect Murasaki’s usage in English, but in fact Tyler has managed it brilliantly. Each chapter opens with a social map that lists the characters and their official titles. This gives us our bearings and a sense of the gravitas that accrues to the person. Not only is this latest English edition the most scrupulously true to the original, it also is superbly written and genuinely engaging. On occasion Tyler even manages to give us a taste of the formal aspect of Murasaki’s style, with some wonderfully meandering, clause-embedded sentences. His technique is quite deliberate, and just as a reader feels the need to come up for air, the realization dawns that we are in fact following a subterranean map of Murasaki’s prose.

Sometimes a new translation refashions a classic so that it bursts forth fresh, as Seamus Heaney’s version of “Beowulf” did. Such literature can be daunting, but there is good reason to adjust our sensibilities; we will be rewarded by windows opening onto genuinely different worlds.

An early 13th-century work called “The Untitled Book” (Mumy{omacronl} S{omacronl}shi) describes a scene in which the narrator, an elderly nun, overhears some young women discussing various tales they have read. One of them says, “Well, now, how about ‘The Tale of Genji’? You can think about it overand over, but it’s so awesome it just couldn’t have come into being all by itself. It must be that the author had the Buddha’s help.” Murasaki may or may not have had the Buddha’s assistance in writing “The Tale of Genji,” but we are blessed to have Tyler’s help in reading it.