Waley’s characterization of Heian court culture as lacking historical consciousness is a debatable proposition, but it provides an example of how the tensions created by his efforts to reconcile his scholarly work with his artistic aims shaped his reading of classical Japanese literature. He may have viewed the ancient Japanese with some slight condescension, and yet his admiration for the aestheticism of the Heian court, its tendency to value the lyrical beauty to be found in the experience of the present moment, grew out of the Modernist sensibility he shared with his literary peers. His translation thus conveys the tone and manner of a romance while at the same time emphasizing certain rhetorical elements in the original that would have been familiar and appealing to his reader-ship: the use of multiple narrative perspectives, the complex play of poetic language, the creation of an illusion of psychological interiority, and the broadly realistic mode of representation.
Pointing out that Waley’s approach placed relatively more stress on those aspects of the work that make it ‘modern’ in no way suggests that his assumptions led to a misreading of the original. Indeed, his observation that Heian court culture was largely defined by an aesthetic sensibility that valued the ‘modern’ highlights one of the most important narrative elements of The Tale of Genji . Genji, for example, is driven by what might be quite properly termed a modernist impulse. He strives to be original, to embrace discontinuity from the past and champion the new as a means to establish the standards for conduct and taste and thereby achieve political and cultural empowerment. He embodies a subversive tendency to undo cultural norms and replace them with those of his own creation. In striving to remake his world and gain priority, he effectively desires to become the embodiment of the tradition itself.
The problem confronting an ideal hero such as Genji is that the creative process cannot be allowed to stop. It must be continuous, for when it ceases the hero becomes conventional and, paradoxically, can no longer embody the tradition of an aesthetic of the present moment. This paradox largely determines the structure of the work as a whole. The sense of time lost, of the evanescence of human life, is palpable, and it is only by the process of constant renewal, which places supreme value on the experience of the present moment, that the loss of time can somehow be recovered—if not literally, then as an aesthetic value that is universal and timeless.
The spiraling structure of The Tale of Genji is the most fundamental expression of Murasaki Shikibu’s aesthetic. The characters constantly give voice to their belief that the past and future are woven together in the present by the bonds of karmic destiny. Yet narrative time moves inexorably forward, and the impossibility of sustaining the world in the present moment by arresting the flow of time haunts Genji and leads him to act out his longings through his search for an ideal woman, who can serve as a substitute for his dead mother, and through the ebb and flow of his political defeats and triumphs.
The desire to assert the significance of the present is central to the original conception of The Tale of Genji . Extreme sensitivity to change and loss is the fundamental ethical value in the text and the primary trait of the hero. Though ever mindful of the religious teaching that all is mutable, Genji refuses ultimately to withdraw from the evanescent world and repeatedly seeks to re-affirm the present and his own ideal qualities. The repetitive pattern of the narrative, the spiral structure created by the constant effort to halt the flow of time and make the present new again, renders impossible any type of formal closure. The only possible ending for such a character is to write him out of the story, without actually depicting his death, when repetitiveness and conventionality threaten to close off the very process of storytelling itself.
As noted above, Waley looked at The Tale of Genji through the lens of a reader whose tastes were shaped by the great European novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and thus he read the work as the product of a society interested in aesthetic rather than intellectual pursuits. However, the scholarly and cultural assumptions behind that mildly condescending judgment were tempered by the rhetorical similarities between Murasaki Shikibu’s narrative and the modern novel and by the sense that Genji’s consciousness of time lost spoke to Modernist sensibilities. In trying to capture both the strangeness and the familiarity (or perhaps the universality) of The Tale of Genji, Waley produced a translation that often sacrificed literalness and precision in the name of literary art. For readers of his generation the distortion produced by this particular emphasis was not an especially urgent problem. The notion that a translation could actually improve on the original was not uncommon, if the reception of the work of other important translators during the period—the Russian novels rendered into English by Constance Garnett or C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s version of A la recherche du temps perdu—is any indication. Assuming that the literary value of a translation may be judged on its own merits apart from the original, it follows that—in the manner of Augustan Period revisions of Shakespeare—a translation may potentially be the superior work of art.
The reputation of Waley’s translation since its publication remains high, but now the praise is more often qualified. It continues to be admired as a work of art that in some ways improves on the original, and is thus original itself, but it is also draws certain complaints that it is rather anachronistic, plays too fast and loose with the original, and shows a cavalier attitude toward historical accuracy. Waley continues to be revered with considerable justification as one of the greatest translators of Japanese literature, but his most important work is viewed by some as a bit of a historical curiosity that has been superseded by subsequent, more accurate versions.
In a sense, the opinions about Waley’s version of The Tale of Genji parallel the ambivalent status that haunts all literary translation. Translating is a humbling task because it heightens our awareness of the parochial nature of particular languages, and thus unavoidably raises issues of faithfulness, originality, and influence. A translation is a kind of virtual palimpsest, a writing over of one language by another that acts as a mediating barrier to the very text it makes intelligible. As a mediation of something assumed to be authentic, translation can be justified only if it maintains the pretense that it is accurate and sincere in its attitude toward the original.
Of course, translation is so fundamental to cultural exchange that its contradictory nature can seem like an analytical illusion, something that is there only when one thinks about it. That may help explain why the dominant ideal of translation is transparency, for the belief that the presence of a translator should not be detectable helps sustain the illusion that the reader is experiencing the words of the original in an unmediated way. Of course, the preference for invisibility comes with its own costs, since it ignores the fact that literary translation is a special type of reading in which the sensibility of the translator merges with that of the original text. Recent concerns that the ideal of transparency may foreclose artistic possibilities may account for the gradual shift in the reputation of translators like Waley, Garnett, and Moncrieff.
The concern with accuracy and sensitivity to cultural difference has been a guiding motivation for all subsequent English-language versions of The Tale of Genji . Edward Seidensticker produced a more literal translation that emphasized a cleaner, simpler diction. His terse, clipped style creates a fine sense of narrative movement, but it also runs counter to the more fluid effects created by Murasaki Shikibu’s language. Moreover, Seidensticker shared with Waley a strong editorial consciousness, one that tries to shape the translation to fit the expectations of mid-twentieth century American literary tastes. As a result, Seidensticker occasionally elides difficult passages (a tendency that appears in his translations of modern novels as well) or even omits materials that seem too culturally specific.
Helen McCullough, who was a preeminent scholar of classical Japanese literature, produced a partial translation, but it is worth considering her work here in part because of her enormous expertise. She strives for an even more literal rendering than Seidensticker, and succeeds in creating a neutral, transparent style. Precise and careful almost to a fault, her version is in some ways the antithesis of Waley’s in that it is far more accurate, but also flatter in tone and affect.
The most recent version, by Royall Tyler, strives to be faithful to the original in different ways. It attempts to replicate the flow of the original by maintaining some of the quirkier characteristics of the language—for example, the different titles by which characters are identified from chapter to chapter, the elliptical style of the poetry, or the sliding, unstable shifts in narrative perspective in certain scenes. While trying to be stylistically faithful, Tyler also strives to be more scholarly than Seidensticker or Waley by the liberal use of footnotes to help contextualize cultural practices or identify poetic allusions. The result is a denser text, more accurate than Waley’s version perhaps, but also more difficult to follow and lacking the pleasing rhythms and sense of narrative drive that Waley achieved.
Each of these more recent versions contributes in their own way to helping the English-speaking reader better understand The Tale of Genji . In doing so, they also pose an obvious and inescapable question. Why, if they are all more accurate, should we bother reading Waley’s translation anymore? The reason lies in the ambivalent nature of the process of translation.
The value of a literary translation is not the instrumental function of conveying knowledge about another culture, but the way it fosters habits of critical thinking through the act of negotiating linguistic difference. A literary translation brings into play the practice of both poetics and criticism in an effort to harmonize languages and thereby make other cultures accessible. But in the act of harmonizing languages and cultures, a translation forces the reader to acknowledge, even if only for a moment, the limits of his or her own assumptions about art and ethics. In this regard Waley’s version, perhaps more than any other, succeeds in challenging the reader to come to terms with the fundamental aesthetic that defined the culture of the Heian court. It continues to command respect and admiration, for like any great work of literary art it makes its readers self-reflective, a necessary condition for both intellectual and emotional understanding.
It is in no way a negative judgment, then, to conclude that Arthur Waley did not produce the impossible, that is, he did not produce the definitive translation of The Tale of Genji . What Waley did create is literary art of extraordinary beauty that brings to life in English the world Murasaki Shikibu imagined. The beauty of his art has not dimmed, but like the original text itself, retains the power to move and enlighten.