Genji Days!

Our book today is a delightful curiosity called Genji Days by Edward Seidenseticker, whose 1976 translation of Murakami Shikibu’s great epic novel The Tale of Genji was as thoroughly the definitive Genji of his generation as Arthur Waley’s had been for the previous generation – or, indeed, Royall Tyler’s 2001 version is currently. For thousands of readers, Seidensticker provided an incredibly welcome alternative to the quasi-Edwardian bombast with which Waley filled out his original; Seidensticker’s version, by contrast, seemed sleek and elegant despite its enormous size (when the gorgeous two-volume hardcover boxed set was selling briskly in bookstores, one Boston customer was heard plaintively asking his wife, “Do we have to read both of them?”).

Seidensticker seemed to catch all the the Genji qualities Waley had missed, from the beauty of the nature-reflections to the confident urbanity of the many Court scenes. Critics were unanimous in their praise, and although the unabridged version has rather shamefully been allowed to lapse out of print (and although the Tyler version is now just a bit preferred by all the very best book discussion groups), the Seidensticker translation still “holds up” marvelously well even by today’s unrelentingly minimalist ethos.

And 1977′s Genji Days is an added little marvel: the whole time that Seidensticker was working on his monumental translation, he was also keeping something of a translator’s diary, which starts in 1970 and continues on at a leisurely pace for the next five or six years. It’s all predictably addictive reading (Seidensticker was an unassuming master of English prose), ranging from slightly dated social observations to impishly funny little anecdotes about what used to be called “the generation gap”:

Young man wearing the ugly emblem which to me looks like a bomber but which is supposed to signify peace came up with a big bag in his hand and said: “Peanuts for peace?” “I am a warmonger,” I replied. I almost thought he was going to hit me, such peace-loving hatred as did shine in his eyes. So I enjoyed the market after all.

But always these entries come back to a translator hard at work; the primary composite image of all these entries is of a scholar at his desk, deeply embedded in his huge ongoing work:

It was a hard day’s work on the Genji, it was, it was. I made my way through a second revision down to the midpoint in “Agemaki.” What a wonderful tragicomedian Kaoru is as he slams the door of the Uji house forever, and then heads back for Uji on the next bus. I did not have a great many footnotes today, but I managed to get all mixed up on such as I did have, and that was fun. Scholarship is fun, perhaps them most fun when it is the most pointless.

Naturally, he has company at that desk – foremost the ghost of Arthur Waley:

My chief impression of Waley, after having been away from him for so long, is that he is very wordy. He embroiders, of course, that we all know, but he embroiders with such a heavy stitch, reminding me of my maternal grandfather as he made us little ones fidget and look out the window from the lunch table. We have always excused Waley his liberties because, we have always said, he wrote such beautiful English, but I am not sure that it is all that beautiful.

(Waley isn’t the only one to come in for some sniping; when Seidensticker mentions his work translating Mishima’s The Five Spots on the Angel, he can’t help comparing it to Genji: “There is a considerable difference between working with jewels and working with tinsel”)

Occasionally he can be testy when forced to interact with the world, although he’s hardly the first person to be peeved by the robotic niceties of modern air travel:

I don’t suppose I am quite as displeased with United vulgarity as I was on my last Hawaiian flight, but it is pretty hard to take all the same. One sees too clearly the difference between good manners and Madison Avenue manners – between household manners of the better sort, acquired at the hearth and the dinner table, and charm-school manners. And the line United Airlines gives you over its public-address devices is such as to make you think it was maybe a bad idea to head for the islands in the first place. All sorts of highly romanticized and not very accurate stuff about their history, and cute lessons in the Hawaiian language, and that sort of thing. I got so annoyed, as it went on and on, that I took to hating my fellow passengers, who seemed to love it.

The saving moments in his Genji Days – as in his Genji – are the ones that feel both quick and timeless, however, and those moments are here in all seasons:

Beautiful, beautiful snow. It started falling heavily in midmorning an is still falling heavily, and there seems to be about a foot on the balconies and walnut trees outside my north windows. I spent a great deal of time through the day lost in the beauty of it when I should have been lost in other things.

It’s easy enough to get lost in this little translator’s diary – I in fact recommend it.