Not A Parody
Courtly Love The Tale of Genji—a translation for our time of a work for all time. BY LAURANCE WIEDER Like Homer and Shakespeare, Lady Murasaki occupies a place alone. Epic poetry begins with...
...The child was the niece and image of the Empress Fujitsubo...
...Homer and Shakespeare's immediacy flows in part from the doing of voices and acting of parts, whether their tales were told after a banquet, in the marketplace, beside a campfire, or at the Globe...
...So the prince served the empire as a commoner...
...Large enough to contain the practice of all the other arts, her novel is an improvisation in the same way that the poems her characters produce on occasions are improvised...
...Shining Genji: the name was imposing," the novelist observes at the beginning of her second chapter, "but not so its bearer's many deplorable lapses...
...One striking example of the inter-penetration of dream and policy is found in a letter the Akashi Prince wrote to his daughter after his granddaughter gave birth to the heir apparent (making the old father the future Emperor's great-great-grandfather...
...The first time I read The Tale of Genji, in Arthur Waley's 1920s translation, I felt like William Butler Yeats encountering Byzantium...
...Have you forgotten this boy...
...My right hand held up Mount Sumeru, and to the mountain's right and left the sun and moon shed their brightness on the world...
...Her The Tale of Genji offers moments straight out of Jane Austen, plots worthy of Henry James, and characters as complex as Marcel Proust's...
...What might be mistaken for an overdeveloped aestheticism and emotional pulse-taking are expressions of an impulse to know as much as possible about the fashioned and social world...
...The dream tableau was more than a picture...
...His lapses are rueful rather than sinful...
...Murasaki's Tale of Genji stands without equal as a nuanced meditation on human perfectibility, desire, and regret...
...Fujit-subo was Genji's childhood companion in the palace and first great love...
...and considering how quiet he kept his wanton ways, . . . whoever broadcast his secrets to all the world was a terrible gossip...
...Just what "connection in a previous life" might entail is revealed in the story of Genji and his young lady (also known as Murasaki...
...Feeling is meaning—and endures...
...Here, as elsewhere, the great thing is to know...
...Whether his affairs succeeded or languished, Genji never forgot a woman—as Murasaki reminds us time and again...
...chief minister...
...The Tale of Genji is an extended confidence...
...Genji's whole being is engaged in finding a way to navigate the waters of this life through attachments and feelings...
...At least two springs feed the well...
...Perhaps that was why the emperor had chosen that young girl to console him after the early death of his beloved favorite...
...Where David is the hero of history, Genji is the hero of domesticity...
...She had a very dear face, and the faint arc of her eyebrows, the forehead from which she had childishly swept back her hair, and the hairline itself were extremely pretty...
...If only I had known...'" In the key of that initial and final uncertainty, Murasaki composes life...
...For Mura-saki, the act of composition is a performance...
...The story begins with the death of Genji's mother, the emperor's too-beloved minor consort...
...Murasaki, a lady-in-waiting in the eleventh-century court of Imperial Japan, wrote the first and still the greatest psychological novel...
...The Tale of Genji speaks directly to those who would like not to make a muddle of life, who need to come to terms with mortality, loss, and misapprehension, rather than with glory, triumph, and everlasting fame...
...That was my dream...
...Her book is graceful, knowing, ambiguous, horrific, smiling, an immersion in duration...
...With their singing and dancing and painting and poems, the courtiers and women of the palace are akin to the circle surrounding Queen Elizabeth I, but even more refined, and without Francis Walsing-ham—or the headsman...
...The child of that covert connection became the heir apparent...
...Henry James thought that a story should go on for as long as the thing hangs together and not beyond...
...grandfather to the heir apparent...
...As the characters talk about women and men, or reflect upon the quality of another's calligraphy and skill at music, poetry, and craft, an entire world arises from the page—a world of love, ambition, intrigue, surprise, dashed hope and synesthetic splendor...
...The Tale of Genji is a spiritual journey, religious in the personal rather than the institutional sense...
...I will not let you!' She was so touched that she managed to breathe: 'Now the end has come, and I am filled with sorrow that our ways must part: the path I would rather take is the one that leads to life...
...Doubt is no longer possible...
...Spiriting Murasaki away from her guardians before her father recalled her existence, Genji established young Murasaki in a wing of his palace...
...A master poet, gifted musician, fascinating dancer, irresistible lover, builder of palaces, connoisseur of the brushstroke, Genji for all his talents is nonetheless an attainable model of what human beings might be—while never denying the truth of what they are...
...I keep him beside me in memory of someone who vanished without a trace...
...The self-consciousness, appreciation for ideas, unerring taste—all this in a form so indissoluble from its content, so beyond fashion, that the chapter where Genji dies is entitled "Vanished into the Clouds," and is blank...
...When Edward Seidensticker's version of Genji appeared in the mid-1970s, I read the novel a second time, paying more attention to the generation of sons that inhabits the last third of the novel, after Genji's death...
...The action occurs on the border between the material present and the fullness of time...
...This sorry heir of the Shining Prince dispatches the last poem in the book: "Following the path I trusted would take me to a teacher of the Law, / I lost my way and wandered a mountain never sought...
...As the father wrote his daughter, "Then you were conceived...
...After that, both secular writings and the scriptures gave me so many reasons to believe in dreams that although unworthy I was awed, and I sought to rear you fittingly...
...This early loss determines the trajectory of Genji's career, and frames the entire tale...
...Western heroism is compounded of the convergence or dissonance of human impulse and divine law...
...Rather, dreams in this world are a dialogue with or eavesdropped hints from outside the limits of waking vision...
...There he personally educated and trained the child to be his life's companion...
...The Tale of Genji ends some 335 pages and twenty years after the death of its central character...
...father of an empress by his wife from exile, the Akashi Princess...
...Musing on his marriage to the daughter of the Akashi prince during a political exile from the capital—an attraction built on the woman's rumored existence and her reputation for musical talent—Genji remarked: "We must have had some connection in a previous life...
...Of course, everyone vanishes without a trace eventually...
...In many ways, The Tale of Genji is a success story like the life of King David...
...Epic poetry begins with Homer...
...The novel's first exchange occurs between the three-year-old Genji's dying mother and the emperor: "'You promised never to leave me, not even at the end,' [the emperor] said, 'and you cannot abandon me now...
...For those unfamiliar with this book—which is longer than all three volumes of Lord of the Rings, though shorter than Remembrance of Things Past—the first two-thirds of the novel follows the cradle-to-grave career of Genji, the Shining Prince...
...Genji thought, fascinated...
...Whatever pleasures this life offers, do not forget the life to come...
...This is not some atavistic streak of superstition or of magic...
...His difficulties and failures have to do with establishing and sustaining intimacy, attaining not so much carnal union as mutual awareness...
...I myself stood below, in the shadows under the mountain, and their light did not reach me...
...The characters in The Tale of Genji act on impulse and weigh their actions against custom and opportunity...
...This is his perfection...
...After experiencing one political setback, Genji rose to unrivalled eminence in the Heian Empire: unacknowledged father of one emperor (by the Empress Fujitsubo...
...At least no word of such things reached the women's quarter, from where The Tale of Genji is told...
...Encouraged to keep each other company by the old emperor—Fujitsubo's husband, Genji's father—the pair once met secretly...
...But where David is faithful to the God of Israel, Genji is faithful to his human attachments, to emotional obligations...
...Here, as in both our sacred and our psychologized world, there are no accidents, only hidden purposes...
...He can have any woman he can see...
...Dreams are not to be dismissed as glosses on desire, or as oraculations...
...The story of the Shining Prince oscillates between the frustration and fulfillment of waking desires and glimpses of other powers, other inklings from a world of dreams...
...Shakespeare invented modern tragedy...
...While still in his teens and on one of his first journeys away from the palace, Genji caught sight of a ten-year-old girl through a brushwood fence...
...The impulses and attachments of Murasaki's characters puzzle those characters as much as they puzzle readers...
...But some still seem more permanent than others, and some memories are more persistent than most, which slide away like water...
...In Murasaki's tale of tenth-century Heian Imperial Japan, unlimited power and privilege enabled the fortunate to follow the promptings of the heart, for good or ill...
...Dreams also exert a force and presence in waking life...
...That is why stories get told...
...The letter explained how he was able to raise his daughter for a great destiny and sustain his courage all those years in exile from court: "My dear," he wrote, "one night in the second month of the year when you were born, I had a dream...
...For a novel written in the eleventh century about a world that even then had vanished, in a translation that has to fold in stylized and alien-to-English poetic forms, The Tale of Genji is amazingly fresh and immediate...
...She is the one I would like to see when she grows up...
...Murasaki, the most omniscient and honest of narrators, began her story one generation before her hero and concluded it one generation after—stopping at the moment it no longer hangs together...
...Our young lady has become Mother of the Realm and all that I have prayed for is accomplished...
...Genji's young lady Murasaki resembled Fujitsubo, yet it was also said that the empress looked very like Genji's mother...
...I then set the mountain afloat on a vast ocean, boarded a little boat, and rowed away toward the west...
...The barriers are sometimes erected by his public duties, sometimes by fortune...
...Love and loss, beauty and time solemnize every act, every appreciation—a kind of talmudic connoisseurship attentive to the scent, the overtone, the implication of every gesture...
...The narrative or karmic thread, which began with the too-passionate and ill-fated love between the emperor and Genji's mother, unspools in the following generation with the disappointment of Genji's putative son, Kaoru...
...Physically beautiful, wealthy, powerful, cultured, talented, intelligent, and good-hearted favorite son though he was, Genji could not be named heir apparent...
...Indeed, he wept when he realized that it was her close resemblance to the lady who claimed all his heart that made it impossible for him to take his eyes off her...
...easier to keep track of who was who (characters in the Japanese don't have proper names, as in English, but are known by rank, or attribute, or family relation, all of which change over the course of a life), and to understand how much time elapsed between chapters...
...Now the Australian Royall Tyler has produced yet another translation, my third encounter with Murasaki's vanished world...
...The little girl sat down...
...This time, it was much Laurance Wieder's forthcoming book of poems, Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms, will be published by Eerdmans...
...After a valedictory couplet, the old man cautioned: "Do not seek to know the month and day of my death...
...I then woke up, and that very morning I, even I, began to hope...
...To begin with, The Tale of Genji is a performance...
...Another source of Murasaki's vitality is the way she tells her story: as a poised, balanced, omniscient participant...
...Not naive, not ignorant, well practiced, yet able to make a stroke like the calligra-pher's or watercolorist's brush when the moment arises, Murasaki wrote a book that assumes a reader...
...We shall meet again, as long as I reach the place where I long to go...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 3
