(9.3,17; 10.1,15,29; 11.12, 19; 12.3,17)

6:30 PM to 8:00 PM, Simms Library

To register, contact Mr. Himwich

Opening Questions:

1. The Women:   Looking carefully at the rainy night conversation in Chapter II,, what portraits of the perfect women can we draw? It may be useful connect these portraits to the women we encounter.

2. Genji’s character: Note passage that comment directly on Genji’s character. Can we accept these at face value, or does Genji seem to be misunderstood even by the narrator, who may herself be a character in the novel?

3. Poetry: How effectively does the poetry work in Chapters I-VI?

Sept 17: VII-XII (7-12)

Oct. 1: III-XVIII (12-18)

Oct. 15: XIX-XXIV (19-24)

Oct. 29: XXV- XXX (25-30)

Nov. 12: XXXI-XXXVI (31-36)

Nov. 19: XXXVII-XLII (37-42)

Dec. 3: XLIII-XLVIII (43-48)

Dec. 17: XLIX-LIV (49-54)

Washburn, Tyler, and Seidensticker translated directly from scholarly editions of the classical Japanese text—not from modern Japanese translations—but they did not work from exactly the same printed edition.

• Edward Seidensticker (1976) used chiefly Yamagishi Tokuhei’s critical edition, Genji monogatari, published by Iwanami Shoten—especially the six-volume Iwanami Bunko edition completed in 1967. He also consulted other commentaries and modern-Japanese renderings, notably Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s, when interpreting difficult passages. In Genji Days, Seidensticker refers repeatedly to “Yamagishi” as his principal textual authority.

  
  

• Royall Tyler (2001) based his translation principally on the six-volume Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshūedition, edited by Abe Akio, Akiyama Ken, Imai Gen’e, and others, published by Shōgakukan in 1994–98. This provides the classical text, extensive annotation, and a modern-Japanese translation. Tyler translated the classical text itself but naturally drew upon the editors’ annotations and interpretations.

  
  

• Dennis Washburn (2015) began with two principal editions: Yamagishi Tokuhei’s six-volume Iwanami edition and the earlier six-volume Shōgakukan Nihon koten bungaku zenshū edition edited by Abe Akio, Akiyama Ken, and Imai Gen’e, published in 1970–76. He then cross-checked them against more recent editions and specialized commentaries.

  
  

Behind all these printed editions lies substantially the same textual tradition: the Aobyōshibon 青表紙本, associated with Fujiwara no Teika’s thirteenth-century recension. Murasaki Shikibu’s autograph manuscript has not survived. Thus the translators were not translating a single surviving “original,” but modern critical reconstructions of a manuscript tradition.

The striking differences among their English versions arise much more from interpretation and translation method than from radically different Japanese source texts.

• the grammatical subject;

• the identity or gender of a speaker;

• the antecedent of a pronoun;

• the precise connection between successive sentences;

• the boundary between a character’s thought and the narrator’s observation;

• sometimes even whether an action is remembered, imagined, reported, or directly witnessed.

The reader must infer these things from courtly conventions, honorifics, shifts of diction, poetic allusions, and the surrounding emotional atmosphere. Because those indications are not always conclusive, a certain indeterminacy remains, e.g., a mobile and sometimes uncertain point of view.

Masao Miyoshi relates Murasaki’s style to that Virginia Woolf.

·  thought passing almost imperceptibly into narration;

·  consciousness dispersed through a scene rather than assigned to a single speaker;

·  emotional meanings carried by light, weather, scent, clothing, music, and remembered poetry;

·  transitions governed by association rather than explicit explanation.

Miyoshi does not review Tyler's translation, but it is clear that Tyler has tried to address some of these issues.