The translation of The Tale of Genji by Arthur Waley (1889-1966) in six parts between 1921 and 1933 was a seminal achievement. Widely praised at the time of its publication for its stylistic beauty and its masterly rendering of characters and setting, the work showed that literary translation, especially from Asian languages, was not merely a narrow scholarly or instrumental pursuit, but a task that could be considered an art form in itself. Its success directly inspired the generation of scholars and translators that was responsible for the subsequent development of Japanese Studies as an academic institution in both Europe and the Americas, and, most important, it represented a milestone in the transmission of knowledge about Japanese culture, making it accessible to a global readership.
The impact of Waley’s translation is in part a reflection of the canonical status of The Tale of Genji , which has occupied a central position in Japan’s cultural history over the past millennium. Like other classics of world literature, it possesses a depth and complexity capable of sustaining multiple interpretations. Murasaki Shikibu’s narrative has served as a source work for countless other artists. It has also inspired readers from different eras and cultures, who have discovered in its fictional representation of courtly Heian society ethical concerns and aesthetic values that resonate with their own understanding of the meaning and significance of human experience.
Over the centuries The Tale of Genji has been interpreted variously as an idealization of the beauty of evanescence, as a romance centered on the role sexual relationships played in political intrigue at the court, or as a tale that exemplifies the truth of fundamental Buddhist concepts such as the mutability of life and the need to cultivate detachment from the world. By the eighteenth century the work’s importance as a key cultural text was widely accepted, and Nativist (kokugaku) scholars such as Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) pursued sophisticated linguistic research that further promoted the idea that Murasaki Shikibu’s literary art exhibited the essence of Japanese ethics and identity. The canonical status conferred on The Tale of Genji took on even greater significance during the latter half of the nineteenth century when Japan, having opened up to the Western world and embarked on the project of remaking itself as a modern imperial power in Asia, felt compelled to claim a special place in the geopolitical order it was reengaging. This claim was largely justified by looking back to Japan’s past, especially its great literary and artistic traditions, and finding there evidence of a superior civilization.
Prompted by this form of aesthetic nationalism, Suematsu KenchM (1855-1920), a leading Meiji Period (1868-1912) politician and author, composed the first English translation of The Tale of Genji , which was published in London in 1882. This was a heavily abridged version, and Suematsu’s decision to write a loose adaptation rather than a rigorously literal translation reflected his own conflicted opinion about the intrinsic literary value of the narrative. On the one hand, he was convinced of the importance of making the work available to an international reader-ship as a way to display the native genius of Japan. On the other hand, he believed that Murasaki Shikibu’s literary techniques were relatively primitive when compared to what he believed were the more sophisticated modern techniques employed by Western novelists.* This combination of parochial pride and a sense of cultural inferiority was not uncommon among Meiji intellectuals and public figures, and explains Suematsu’s decision to adapt the text both structurally and stylistically in a manner that, in his view, would better accord with the expectations of an English-speaking readership.
Suematsu’s conflicted feelings are the product of attitudes specific to Meiji Japan and of a more general ambivalence that all literary translators experience. Because Suematsu thought it inappropriate to even attempt to reproduce in English the rich ambiguities of Murasaki Shikibu’s language, he subjected himself to the criticism that he was not being true to the original. His defense was that classical Japanese language and the culture of the court were so alien to modern sensibilities that treating such a difficult text in a literal way would have made it incomprehensible to Victorian-era readers. It may seem easy now to dismiss this defense, but moving across the border between languages and cultures inevitably demands concessions and compromises, even for translators whose sole aim is to create a literal version that strictly follows the rhetorical logic of the original. Since something is always gained and lost in a translation, the only way to gauge its achievement rigorously and fairly is to be mindful of the particular standards, operating at any given historical moment, by which readers determine what constitutes successful.
Suematsu’s experience illustrates the special challenges that await the translator who seeks to bring a classical work into the present, and thus sets the context for a brief consideration of the conditions that made Waley’s translation possible. The task that confronted Waley in the 1920s was monumental, and his training for it was rather unusual. He had been born into comfortable circumstances in Tunbridge Wells, Kent in 1889. His father, David Frederick Schloss, was an economist whose family was Anglo-Jewish. The difficulties posed by his ethnic heritage (or at least his consciousness of those difficulties) are evident in Waley’s decision to change his surname in 1914, adopting his paternal grandmother’s maiden name. He attended Cambridge University, where he took a degree in Classics in 1910, and in 1913 he was appointed to a post in the British Museum overseeing the collection of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts. In order to catalogue items he had to learn to read Chinese and Japanese, and it was from these beginnings that he began to work on literary translations, starting with poetry in Chinese, which led to a brief professional association with Ezra Pound. After achieving success as a translator, he quit his job at the British Museum in 1929, maintaining his scholarly credentials by lecturing at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. During the period of his life when he translated The Tale of Genji he resided in Bloomsbury, and was friends with members of the Bloomsbury Group, some of whom he had met during his college years.*
In spite of his enormous linguistic talents, Waley had to work on The Tale of Genji largely in isolation (it is well known that he never visited Japan), and he did not have at his disposal the quality or volume of postwar commentaries and editions that from the 1950s on helped make the original text more accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. Moreover, he did not have a model to follow (Suematsu’s translation notwithstanding) for developing a literary style in English that would create an appropriate analogue for Heian Period court vernacular.
Waley’s early personal and professional background helped shape his conception of literature and of translation as an art in a number of key ways. Whatever anxieties his family background may have provoked, he was a member of an elite group of scholars and intellectuals; and the simple fact that he took on The Tale of Genji in the manner he did suggests that he shared, or at least was never bothered enough to question, his generation’s confidence, born of imperialist assumptions, in its cultural superiority and the universality of its standards of aesthetic tastes.
The elite world Waley inhabited may well have been insular and self-absorbed—Pound, for example, derided some of Waley’s early translations of Chinese poetry as being fussy and too academic—but it was not the only world he inhabited. His literary connections, especially with the Bloomsbury Group, put him in contact with a circle of writers who were on the cutting edge of literary Modernism. These interactions undoubtedly reinforced his already strong propensity to privilege a belief in the priority of genius and the individual talent (to borrow Eliot’s phrase) in the creation of new art. However, in occupying these two worlds Waley had to reconcile the perceived divide between the work of the scholar and that of the poet in order to treat translation as a form of art that attempts not only to capture, through careful attention to historical and linguistic research, the parochial qualities of the original text that make it worthy of translation, but also to conform to broad contemporary literary standards.
It is not clear if Waley was ever seriously bothered by his lack of direct connection with modern Japan, but it is likely that he was not. The isolation in which he worked and the palpable need for control that his approach implied may have originated in his personal circumstances, since he viewed his own ethnicity as a potential hindrance to full assimilation into the institutional elites of imperial Britain. However, it seems equally plausible to view his approach to the task of translation in more narrowly artistic terms as a means for self-expression. After all, his fascination for Heian culture was of a piece with the Japonism that had such a profound effect on European art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a kind of exoticism that further emphasized the universalized aesthetic superiority of the West over the particularized local cultures of the East.
The assumptions that guided Waley’s conception of translation as a form of literary art found explicit expression in his views about the fundamental nature of Heian court culture. In discussing some of the literary techniques in The Tale of Genji that appeared modern to him, he once compared Murasaki Shikibu’s use of foreshadowing with that of Proust. He later regretted the comparison, insisting that the great cultural divide between Murasaki’s epoch and twentieth-century Britain made any such general resemblances purely accidental.* For example, he argued that a preoccupation with the present moment pervaded Heian aesthetics, but was careful to stress that there was a difference between that preoccupation and Modernist obsessions with making art new for the present. He described tenth-century court society in Japan as “a purely aesthetic and, above all, a literary civilization. Never, among people of exquisite cultivation and lively intelligence, have purely intellectual pursuits played so small a part. What strikes us most is that the past was almost a blank.... It is indeed our intense curiosity about the past that most sharply distinguishes us from the ancient Japanese.... Their absorption in the present, the fact that with them ‘modern’ was invariably a term of praise, differentiates them from us in a way that is immediately obvious.”*
Waley is struck by the Heian court conception of the “modern” (imamekashi), which he sees as remarkably lacking in historical consciousness. At the same time, Heian aesthetics, grounded on the value of experiencing the present moment, was surely a source of the almost primitivist appeal of Murasaki Shikibu’s work to Waley’s generation, which was so acutely preoccupied with the ironies of its own historical position that it was possible to conceive, in the manner of Virginia Woolf, that “on or about December, 1910 human character changed.”†