Genji, my foot

I promised Karen I would post here. So here it is, long overdue, a post on my attempts (I'm still attempting) to read The Tale Of Genji.

That's an ancient Japanese classic, like Japan's Dream Of The Red Chamber, all about the womanising adventures of an absurdly beautiful prince named Genji. (I guess he's supposed to be a Heian-era Takeshi Kaneshiro.) Some years ago, I got this bee in my bonnet that I should read it and not knowing classical Japanese (or even modern Japanese, for the matter) I got busy buying English translations of it (full disclosure: I have multiple translations of Anna Karenina, and Crime And Punishment - yeah, I'm one nutty ex-lit student).

So one day, I got round to reading the first few pages the Seidensticker translation of Genji, which is supposed to be the accurate one. But it just all sounded so - unbeautiful? The sentences sounded clunky. The Chinese say, ge xue sao yang (scratching at an itch through the boot). And well, this translation was like one big unattractive boot made from too-thick leather. Like Uggs, maybe. And somewhere inside, too deep inside, was the beauty of the original which I was not getting.

So I switched to the two-volume translation by Arthur Waley, who is known to write beautifully. He is also famous for translations that are not that accurate and take a bit of poetic licence here and there. But I thought, what the hell, as long as it reads well. And it did read better than Seidensticker's. But still it was not as engaging as I had hoped.

So I was a few chapters into Waley when a friend and I happened to be at Kinokuniya, where my friend found two versions of Genji - in Chinese. And I had one of my "why didn't I think of that?" moments. Because, really, from ancient Japanese to English, it's a big jump and certain cultural nuances are bound to be lost. But a jump from Japanese to Chinese is not so great and in the case of Genji, I guess the vocabulary of situations arising from having too many imperial consorts really translates better in Chinese than English. So to use the boot analogy, the Chinese translations are like a silk stalking. They get you closer to that very pretty foot that is the original.

So I've been reading the first few chapters of Genji all over again, this time in Lin Wen-yue's translation. And what I like about this is, at least now I know what all their names mean, since the Japanese characters are the same as the Chinese characters and now each name conjures an image. And when the Japanese characters are referring to Chinese poems like Everlasting Regret in the Chinese translation, I get the poems in their original not-mangled-in-English form, it's just emotionally more immediate. Gets under my skin more.

Anyways, at the rate I'm going, I'll probably take years to finish it. If I don't get distracted along the way by say, Freakonomics, or something.