Translation as Community: The Opacity of Modernizations of Genji monogatari

JONATHAN E. ABEL

[W]hat sort of social relation is translation in the first place?1

[H]ow do we communicate? But this question can be asked seriously only if we dismiss all “theories of communication,” which begin by positing the necessity or the desire for a consensus, a continuity and a transfer of messages. It is not a question of establishing rules for communication, it is a question of understanding before all else that in “communication” what takes place is an exposition: finite existence exposed to finite existence, co-appearing before it and with it.2

One of the ways to get around the confines of one’s “identity” as one produces expository prose is to work at someone else’s title, as one works with a language that belongs to many others. This, after all, is one of the seductions of translating. It is a simple miming of the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self.3

Several recent studies focus on translations in order to deconstruct notions of the other and, thereby, to reveal the foreign originary light filtered through the domesticating (here read colonizing, racist, sexist, etc.) lenses of a translating self. Such studies that rigorously locate translations in the moments and places of their translation (rather than in some translatable essence) may expose some general presumptions of lay readers who overlook the translated-ness of a translation. In doing so, however, they obviate the possibility of not only translation, but also reading. That is to say, in finding difference, in explicating the ways in which translators “mutilate” and “abuse” the “sacred” text, these arguments fail to acknowledge dynamics of meaning-making inherent in reading processes and ignore key relationships posited by the act of translation—the community of author, translator, and reader of texts and translated texts. In his La communauté désoeuvrée (The Inoperative Community), Jean-Luc Nancy describes community based not on a “common being” wherein singularities give themselves up to a whole, but rather on a “being in common” in which singularities stand in relation, in which self and other are each one of two. Discussing translation in terms of Nancy’s community foregrounds both similarities and differences between text and other text, while maintaining the integrity of both.

Wrought from historical conditions that conflict with notions of an original, Genji monogatari image (Tales of Genji) continues to provide critics and authors a site for identity formation. Translations from an archaic, supposedly onna-de image (woman’s hand) Heian-period style into various post-genbun’itchi image4 twentieth-century prose modes reiterate this theme of identity. While providing a new approach to Genji, reading modern Japanese translations as existing in a community with earlier versions revises and refines not only notions of what Genji is, but also recent theoretical approaches to translation and Nancy’s notions of community.

TRANSLATION AS COMMUNITY: COUNTERING THE ETHICS OF DIFFERENCE

Beginning where Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha,5 amongst others, leave off in their declarations of the infinitely appropriable nature of texts, Anthony Pym, Antoine Berman, and Lawrence Venuti6 celebrate the difference of translation from the translated and the agency of the translator. In particular, Venuti thrills at the possibility of Benjamin’s foreignizing7 translation: “The ethical stance I advocate urges that translations be written, read, and evaluated with greater respect for linguistic and cultural differences.”8 If this important difference of translation from translated, a difference that deconstructs “transparency,” is taken to an extreme, then translation and reading become impossible. If texts are only always already located in, prisoners of their moments of production, then to translate or read would be a hopeless attempt to recover origins. Moreover, as we shall see, transparency is not a universal, transhistorical assumption about translation and, thus, only needs deconstructing in particular cultural moments.

In the spirit of Hall and Bhabha, it is useful to reiterate that any text is infinitely able to be appropriated, articulated, or translated; furthermore, no such appropriations are any more necessary or correct than any others. Contrary to those who would promote a universal ethics of translation, I begin with the potentially reductive and relativist assumption that there is no transhistorically good translation; there are only notions of translation as manifested differently in varied times and spaces. When and where a text is considered to be translation, it is translation. A translation does not reside in a necessarily subservient place below a canonical translated original.

Some recent translation scholars seem to concur that translation is possible; yet they praise the tacit references to the foreign within a translation that simultaneously proclaim translated-ness and conversely deny the possibility of translation and even reading. In other words, a translation that contains ungrammatical sentences, that includes words from the foreign text, that, in short, is uncomfortable for the reader of the target language, evokes both awareness of its own translated-ness and the impossibility of translation.

Aware of this conundrum, David Bellos proposes that, “translatability is the only imaginable guarantee of meaning. In that sense it offers a commonsensical and irrefutable definition of what a language is: a language that is impossible to translate is not a language; a text that is impossible to translate is not written in a language.”9 Everything written in language is translatable. Naoki Sakai’s fixation on heterogeneity of language echoes Bellos’s claim that translation is never impossible, but possible within language may be revised. Sakai writes: “every translation calls for a countertranslation, and in this sort of address it is clearly evident that within the framework of communication, translation must be endless. Thus, in the heterolingual address, the addressee must translate any delivery, whether in speech or writing, in order for that delivery to actually be received.”10 Communication necessitates translation from heterogeneous linguistic space into another heterogeneous linguistic space. Though they differ from the others by openly recognizing the necessity and possibility of translation, Bellos and Sakai share with Pym, Berman, and Venuti an overvaluation of translation as the communication of a message or meaning.

Though he does not openly relate his ideas to issues of translation, Nancy argues for a different notion of communication: “what communication writes, what writing communicates, is in no way a truth possessed, appropriated or transmitted—even though it is, absolutely, the truth of being-in-common.”11 In this sense, communication is not the transference of a message, but rather the existence of identities standing in relation to one another. Differences and similarities, selves and others, texts and intertexts, commune in ways that never allow for the speaking of one without the other; they exist, are identifiable only in relation:

We are alike because each one of us is exposed to the outside that we are for ourselves. The like is not the same (le semblable n’est pas le pareil). I do not rediscover myself, nor do I recognize myself in the other: I experience the other’s alterity, or I experience alterity in the other together with the alteration that “in me” sets my singularity outside me and infinitely delimits it. Community is that singular ontological order in which the other and the same are alike (sont le semblable): that is to say, in the sharing of identity.12

Though Nancy does not explicitly mention translation, his thoughts readily apply to the relationship of trans-lator/lation to translated: The translator (and the translation) experiences the translated’s alterity; and at this limit of identity one text exposes itself to another. Community is that singular ontological order in which the translated and the translation are alike. Contrary to notions that normatively judge translations in terms of similarities and differences with an original, viewing translation as community reveals how both similarities and differences constitute the singular identities of the translated and the translation. These identities stand in a relationship, not as a dominant, original influencer and subordinate, derivative influenced, not even as in a dialogue, but rather as entities equally and infinitely interpretable, appropriable, articulatable, and translatable. Through these acts of meaning-making, that is, through these readings, identities form in relation to each other. Being in common, the community, appears most clearly in constellations of texts that go by the same title, modern language translations.

GENDAIGOYAKU AS TRANSLATION: ORIGINALS, DRIVE, SIMPATICO, AND ORIGINALITY

translate. to turn from one language into another; to change into another language retaining the sense; to render; also, to express in other words, to paraphrase.13 (OED) imageimage14 (Kōjien)

A modernization of a classic into a contemporary form of “the same language” might seem very different from a translation.15 The gendaigoyaku chosen here, however, represent a unique mode of translation for at least two reasons: first, an assumption of translation as transparent is largely a non-issue with these works; second, the vast discontinuities and gaps between gendaigo image (modern language) and bungo image (classical, literary language) engender significant variety within the heterolingual space now called “Japanese.” In an ancient culture in which reading, writing, and speaking were one and in a modern, cosmopolitan culture that is continually adopting and adapting, there can be little ado about the sacredness of the original. Though the name of the text is canonical, its contents are appropriable, excisable, and translatable with little outrage except among a few pedantic critics. This represents a significant situation overlooked by recent translation theorists, a situation featuring famous writers singing their individuality, rather than obscure scholars hiding in marginalia. Despite the absence of characteristics that some might assume to be inherent in translation, gendaigoyaku may be considered translations. The gap between classical onna-de discursive style and contemporary forms of post-genbun’itchi Japanese prose presents a situation necessitating and calling for translation;16 in other words, Genji is so much an other to modern readers and authors that it requires a redefinition of self. Contemporary commentaries on modern language translations attest to the difference of the Heian discourse from modern understanding/language and the subsequent desire to translate (or, as Berman, in somewhat Freudian terminology, refers to it, “the translation drive”).

From Heian “Originals” to Cartoon Genjis

The Heian reading and composing environment, the early textual variants, and the many post-Heian appropriations of Genji disallow presumptions about translation that posit the translated as superior, sacred, and original. In much contemporary scholarship on Genji, a palpable slip between rhetoric and subject reveals logical problems in critical arguments; in their complicated tales of textual variants from no fewer than three lineages, some critics’ words expose their own assumptions about authorial power, the integrity of the entire text, and an originary source. After discussing the multitude of variant extant classical texts, Haruo Shirane writes: “It is thus impossible to know the original Genji. The text that this study is based upon is an edited version of the Aobyōshi (Blue-Cover) recension that is probably close to the original but that, in the final analysis, represents only one version of this masterpiece”17 (emphasis added). The desire for an original Genji contradicts general truths not only of composition at any moment in history, but also of the cultural situation of texts in Heian, and of how those texts have been taken by the non-scholarly community since—namely, that there is never such an entity as an original and that such desire for an origin opposes how Genji means at various historical junctures.

The scant knowledge available about ancient writing and reading practices suggests a situation rather foreign to the common contemporary modes of keyboards and silence. In the inner world of the salon, Heian court ladies probably read aloud, looked at pictures, and copied texts in groups. The texts themselves may have acted as prompters (rather than scripts) to speakers who would embellish and omit as the occasion demanded. For these reasons, the various Genji monogatari are most likely the products of joint participation of writer/speaker and listener/copier.18 But these terms themselves are problematic and provisional: the writer/speaker also likely listened to reactions of the listener/copier; and, after all, is not the copier also a writer? In addition, the collection of “chapters” now known as Genji was likely composed in a very different order than modern annotated versions propound.19 The tales themselves also have various origins in literary and historical figures popular throughout the period.20 Furthermore, it is evident that the tales were read/told and reread/retold in different settings in front of various audiences. Under such circumstances, producers and receivers, texts and intertexts are inseparable. And it is precisely the multifarious production effort that denies the notion of monumentality21 of the text or a unified original moment or person responsible for text production. The texts produced had to be in constant flux, changeable as the situation was due or even upon the whim of a listener/reader/writer/copier/speaker.

The notion of an original to be translated is further complicated by the numerous textual lineages. Even before the search for extant Genji texts during the Kamakura period (1192–1333), several versions circulated in Murasaki’s lifetime, at least one of which was not authoritative.22 Since Teika (1162–1241) and Mitsuyuki (1163–1244), scholars have unsuccessfully endeavored to produce an authoritative original Genji.23 Though scholars have long sought an original with which to prove their adversaries wrong, the desire to maintain the sacred place of an original seems to have been less of a concern for later producers of cultural material. Genji has been a favorite playground for witty satirists and literature-savvy dilettantes since at least the Edo period (1600–1868). One of the more famous gesaku (low-brow) versions, Tanehiko Ryutei’s The Phony Murasaki and the Redneck Genji (Nise-Murasaki inaka-Genji, 1829–42) provided a plucky summary of the Genji stories—a version that, according to some, proves that, “Genji monogatari was read, without exception, as a wholly lustful book image.”24 While it is true that this kind of satire could only occur/exist in a period when Genji maintained cultural capital as a topos, Redneck Genji counters the notion of a sacred text. This kind of free play drawing on both the canonical status and the infinite appropriability of Genji continued in several Edo e-maki (picture book) versions and no fewer than three manga (comic book) versions in the twentieth century.25

Difficulty

Y: The international value of Genji monogatari is on the rise, and even within Japan it has become a widely familiar work through the gendaigoyaku starting with Yosano Akiko’s, then Tanizaki’s, Enchi’s, and Funabashi’s and such. How and why has this familiarity been cultivated? In short, where is the charm in Genji.

A: Well, to make reading the classical Genji a subject of research is not interesting at all. It’s a pain! (Laugh)26

In Yutaka Yamanaka’s interview with renowned literary scholar Akio Abe, the subject turns briefly from the inherent “charm of Genji” to the particular charm of Genji in translation. After Yamanaka suggests that the translations have some causal relationship with the recent, burgeoning charm, Abe concurs, noting the difficulty of the classical versions. Indeed, it is this difficulty, difference, alterity, otherness, and “pain” of the Heian texts that demands their translation. The difficulty is attested to by the contemporary nuance of the phrase Suma kaeri (returning from Suma) referring not to Genji’s, the character’s, return from Suma, the geographic locale, but to perplexed readers who go back and begin reading the story again with the hope of renewed understanding when they reach the end of “Suma,” the locale of the twelfth of fifty-four chapters.27

The discourse on this difficulty ranges from commentators on to producers of the gendaigoyaku, among whom are some of the most well-known Japanese scholars and writers of the twentieth century. In a roundtable discussion with Harumi, a.k.a. Jakuchō, Seto’uchi (several years prior to her own gendaigoyaku of Genji), Yukio Mishima, himself known for his nuanced readings and appropriations of premodern language, noted: “There is a problem of gendaigoyaku. I am definitely against modernizations of the classics in principle…. But if it’s Genji monogatari, well, that’s a bit of an exception, because it’s so difficult. Right?”28 For a virtuoso of Mishima’s stature to admit the difficulty of the text is not the exception, but the rule. Ivan Morris notes that “some, including as prominent a literary man as Hakuchō Masamune, find Arthur Waley’s (English language) translation more comprehensible than the original text”(parenthetical added).29

In commentary on each of the three gendaigoyaku to be considered here, this expression of the difficulty of the classical texts surfaces. Ōgai Mori (writing as Rintarō Mori) wrote in his preface to the first edition of Akiko Yosano’s Shinyaku Genji monogatari (1911–13): “When I read Genji, I am always overcome by resistance image and I feel like I can not develop the meanings from the words.”30 Expressing similar views, Yoshio Yamada, the scholar who acted as a supervisor and consultant on Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s first two gendaigoyaku and whose name appears along side Tanizaki’s on those title pages, wrote “Mr. Tanizaki and Genji monogatari: The Words of a Supervisor,” an article published in Chūō kōron (1939) concurrently with the publication of the Tanizaki’s wartime gendaigoyaku. According to Yamada, the difficulty of the original barred modern readers from understanding the flow of the entirety of the Genji stories. He saw the gendaigoyaku as allowing readers to sense this for the first time.31 Finally, in her 1974 preface, Fumiko Enchi equated writing her gendaigoyaku to climbing Mount Everest; the desire to climb and write both stemming from a “because it’s there” attitude.32

Drive From Monogatari to Shōsetsu

In as unproblematic words image as possible, I wanted to tell the Genji I read in my heart to the modern reader…. To read [Genji] like a regular novel image, that is the feeling I wanted readers to have as they turn the pages.33

For modern translators, the difficult challenge presented by translation of monogatari is countered by a “translation drive” that combines both a domesticating impulse and an “innate antagonism toward the translator’s native tongue.”34 What Yamada claims to be a desire to “revitalize image it in the form of a modern novel image,”35 clearly manifests itself in the subtle conversion of the monogatari (tale) form to that of the shōsetsu (novel). For Takuya Tamagami, scholar of Heian reading practice, this transformation represents only a loss: “Almost imperceptibly, the number of people who think of monogatari as shōsetsu has grown. They think that by regarding monogatari as shōsetsu the value of monogatari will increase.”36 However, the “anti-monogatari-ness” image37 of the gendaigoyaku both extinguishes aspects of monogatari and gives birth to new notions of novel. At once, this process of translation elides aspects of monogatari and disrupts shōsetsu conventions.

Author’s Role in Cultivating New Originality

Of course gendaigoyaku are nothing more than spin-offs of the original that pass through the interior of the translator. As for this translation, it is meant to naturally touch off awakening to the differing meanings image of the original, but regarding the original’s system of expression one should look for guidance in the multifaceted notes whereby the unfolding world into which the self is cast, the reader and their daily activities are separate, and don’t they become a people living in another world?38

Writing on the scholarly gendaigoyaku accompanying the classical text in the recent Shōgakkan edition of Genji, Ken Akiyama argues for the necessity of modernizations for bringing the Heian world to the reader (imageimage39), but is in no way convinced that the translations are transparent renderings. For Akiyama the translations begin to open the world of Heian, but are secondary and derivative “spin-offs” image. Compared with these marginal glossing translations, intended not as transparent mirrors but as scholarly guides to the texts at hand, the difference from the classical texts of the gendaigoyaku written by major authors is tremendous. What concerns the argument at hand is less Akiyama’s normative language than the recognition of this alterity stemming from the “interior of the translator.” Where readers have to search the text to find the names of writers of the scholarly marginal translations, the popular translations scream the names of their translators on the covers and title pages. Perhaps surprisingly for those who would deconstruct the transparency of translations, in the case of Yosano’s, Tanizaki’s, and Enchi’s gendaigoyaku, the name of the putative author, Murasaki Shikibu, is nowhere to be found on covers or title pages. These are not translations of Murasaki Shikibu’s tale, but rather translations of Genji according to Yosano, Tanizaki, and Enchi. The subjectivity of the new author/translator is always opaque.

These writers of gendaigoyaku hold no illusion of transparency with their urge to bring the difficult translated to a wider audience. Though, to varying degrees, translators tend to note their own sympathies for and understandings of the “original text” image, an originary author (Murasaki Shikibu), or the Heian court, all are aware of the manipulations, embellishments, and elisions their translations inscribe. In short, though simpatico is overtly stated as justification for the right to translate, none are so bold as to suggest that their versions equal the classic. And here, though it would seem to argue for the perception of a derivative inferiority of translation, gendaigoyaku, precisely in their stated difference from the classics, gain individual identity. Authors admit the “damage” done to the original and, in so doing, construct the being of the translation, a being that is not partial, derivative, or subordinate, but as whole, independent, and self-contained as any other text.

Though in the end Venuti negates the importance of simpatico as a criteria of translation, he recognizes the seductive temptation of the belief in sameness: “The translator works better when he and the author are simpatico, … (meaning) not just ‘agreeable’ or ‘congenial,’ … but also ‘possessing an underlying sympathy.’ The translator should not merely get along with the author, not merely find him likeable; there should also be an identity between them.”40 Here Venuti raises the myth of the common identity, the common being that Nancy calls “fascist” and “non-communitarian.” Despite the fact that all such common identities are dangerous fictions that can erase individuality and freedom, identity politician Gayatri Spivak, too argues for a similar notion of simpatico: “Unless the translator has earned the right to become the intimate reader, she cannot surrender to the text, cannot respond to the special call of the text.”41 While Spivak would argue that Tanizaki had never truly earned the right, the logical extreme to her brand of identity politics would end in his presumptuous proclamation: “I feel that we cannot easily forgive (Genji’s) contrivances with other women and the sweet words exchanged. I am a feminist image so I feel this even more.”42 This declaration, though dubious, perhaps, results from the belief in shared common being. While this kind of belief exemplified also in both Akiko Yosano’s and Fumiko Enchi’s comments,43 may provide added motivation and incentive during the painstaking process of translation, it does not necessarily have the effect of producing translations that exhibit a common being, but rather ones that share a being in common with the Heian texts. That is, rather than producing texts that are derivative ancestors of some tradition, this belief has the end of producing unique texts with identities of their own, which, because of the agency inherent in such identity, can then share in a literary community with the Heian text. This community of individual texts is most apparent in the comments on gendaigoyaku that speak of their different and unique styles.

Here we shall find no assumption of the anonymity of the translator, but rather continual praise of the particular personality of the translator. On the publication of Akiko Yosano’s first of three gendaigoyaku, both Bin Ueda and Ōgai Mori fixate on the suitableness of Yosano to the job; Ueda writes, “When I heard that a modern spoken word translation image of Genji monogatari was being published from the hand of Ms. Yosano, I celebrated the fact that for this work they’ve hit on the most suitable person.”44 Later in the same preface, Ueda praises the loss of honorifics in her version. Here it is not that Yosano is best suited because of her ability to transparently render the original in modern Japanese, but rather that she has a modern style well suited to rewrite Genji for the modern age. Mishima similarly draws attention not to the relative transparency of different gendaigoyaku, but rather to their individual style. Lamenting Tanizaki’s lack of kango image (Sinified words), Mishima comments, “Now Tanizaki’s is really very characteristic, but Yosano’s, well, that is the one I really like. It’s so chic image. It’s got the feel of a woman’s Blue Stocking novel from Meiji.”45 Though critical of the kango style of Mishima, Yosano, and Ōgai, Tanizaki concurs, declaring the matter to be one of style: “A long time ago, Mr. Ōgai said something like Genji is one kind of bad style image but thinking about it, Genji’s sentences are not at all suited to the personality of Mr. Ōgai by their very nature. One might say that Mr. Ōgai’s deeply thought-out, word-byword, clear style without excess is exactly the opposite of Genji’s.”46 Whatever writers may state the “essence” of the classical Genji to be, such “essence” always relates to issues of style for translators and readers alike; furthermore, in the wealth of writing about their work, translators continually show a consciousness of choosing a new style and manner. Aware of her own agency in her translation, Enchi writes:

[T]he concise (streamlined image) beauty of the expert, kana hand that wrote the sentences in Genji cannot possibly be communicated in modern Japanese; while doing this trial run of a translation I felt keenly that if you force the communicating you end up with the exact opposite result. So, daringly, I took the concise beauty that combines strength and softness and threw it out in the modern sentences.47

Though Enchi calls herself “daring” while attempting to avoid doing the “opposite” of the classic, she later recognizes that changes are inevitable: “It is a natural fact that, when we read the original from our viewpoint of 1970’s Japan, the light and echoes through which our reality will creep will necessarily differ from those Genji readers in the dawn of Heian.”48 In an interview after the release of his memoirs on translating Genji, Osamu Hashimoto goes even further than Enchi, declaring his sovereignty as an author while expressing his desire to “torment” the icon, Murasaki Shikibu: “ ‘Torment’ means, of course, taking Murasaki’s subject matter and doing something else with it image…. As for me, if Murasaki Shikibu read both Genji’s Requiem (Hashimoto’s memoirs, Genji kuyō image) and Half-Baked Genji (his translation, Yōhen Genji monogatari image) and went into a jealous frenzy and ripped them up, I’d be happy.”49 Though perhaps overstated here, that the gendaigoyaku “tramples” the “original” is rarely forgotten by translators and readers alike.

Though the gendaigoyaku is a translation, it represents a form of translation rarely encountered in current North American discussions of translation—a form in which style is always foregrounded, in which change is assumed, and in which the original text is far from sacred. Takehiko Noguchi writes:

The language of literature is recycled in the language of the next literature…. In the vernacular image translations of classical works, the language is not just the accumulation of various individual meta-languages image. Even for those who claim an unabridged translation is derivative (secondary, image), the language must be consistent with itself. For instance, Akiko Yosanov, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and lately Fumiko Enchi’s modernizations of Genji monogatari must be independent creations image.50

This independence of gendaigoyaku is necessary for them to be translations. If they merely repeat the text in wholly transparent form, then they may end with the extreme translation in Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” one that is so precise it repeats the original word for word.51

Merely seeking the difference of these texts, merely locating them in their biographical, political, social, and historical discursive moments would insufficiently address the identities of these gendaigoyaku. Though such studies may return agency to the translator in cultures where transparency is assumed, they tend to deny the relationship among texts in order to do so. Translations do share something with the translated, but this sharing is not the communicating of one text’s message to another, the erasing of one by another, the domineering of one over another, or the embellishment of one text at the expense of the other. This sharing is the being-in-common, the standing-in-relation between two texts. How such texts (gendaigoyaku) stand in relation to other texts (intertexts) can only be sought through a careful analysis of differences and similarities, and, thereby, of consideration of what difference and similarity mean. As a reflection on how certain kinds of translations exist in certain moments, this essay is only a first step in a process of highlighting the functioning of a literary communism, the risk and promise of which would depend on the careful delineation of the similarities and differences between several versions of gendaigoyaku.

NOTES

1. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 3.

2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 76 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. xl.

3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, eds. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 178.

4. The late nineteenth century movement to “unify” written and spoken forms, that is to make written, literary Japanese more like spoken Japanese. Arguments for genbun’itchi tend to revolve around the as-it-is quality of spoken form and the need for similar transparency in written language.

5. See Hall and Bhabha on articulations and appropriations. Stuart Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996); Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken For Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), passim.

6. Anthony Pym, Translation and Text Transfer: an Essay on the Principles of Intercultural Communication (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992); Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility; Venuti, Scandals.

7. By “foreignizing,” I mean here a translation that interrupts the grammar of the target language. Walter Benjamin, “Task of the Translator.” Here we might also note that Luise von Flotow-Evans has argued for translations that actively confront, change, and improve their text. She concentrates on feminist retranslations of the Bible. Luise von Flotow-Evans, Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism,” Translation Theories Explained, ed. Anthony Pym, vol. 2 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997), passim.

8. Venuti, Scandals, 6.

9. David Bellos, “Translation, Imitation, Appropriation: On Working With Impossible Texts,” in On Translating French Literature and Film, ed. Harris, Rodopi (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), p. 12. For Bellos, the only text impossible to translate is written with “pragmatic, pictorial, numerical or other non-lexical, non-grammatical, non-linguistic features of the signified”(13). This is a claim that is substantiated by the number of translations of seemingly impossible texts. In addition to Bellos’s translations of Perec, one might add the Japanese translations of James Joyce’s Ulysses, or the numerous foreign language translations of Genji monogatari.

10. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, p. 9.

11. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 40.

12. Ibid. pp. 33–34.

13. “Translate,” The Oxford English Dictionary, eds. J. A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 2d ed., vol. 20 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

14. “Yaku: to take linguistic expressions and systematically change them into another language, the passing on of meaning. See hon’yaku [translation] tsūyaku [interpret] and yakubun [version].” From “Yaku,” Kōjien, ed. Izuru Shinmura, Dai 4-han. (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1991)

15. Modernizations of Middle English texts like Chaucer or even Shakespeare abound, but rarely are used beyond the high school level. However, Seamus Heaney’s recent modernization of the Old English Beowulf will probably be more widely read than the original. This is comparable to the case of modernizations by famous authors of classical Japanese, with the notable difference that where there are few classics of Old English, many of the canonical works of Japanese literature stem from within one hundred years of Genji; yet it is the language and story of Genji that has appealed to scores of writers throughout the twentieth century to a greater degree than other Heian literature. (Most notably, only Genji and Heike have been translated into modern Japanese by famous writers in the last few years.)

16. It is not insignificant that one of the early essays in the genbun’itchi debates ended in attempt at gendaigoyaku, that is in rewriting several sentences from classical texts in a genbun’itchi style. Takami Mozume, “Gembun’itchi,” Meiji bunka zenshū, vol. 20 (Tōkyō: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1967).

17. Haruo Shirane, The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of the Tale of Genji. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 226.

18. Takuya Tamagami, “Monogatari ondokuron josetu—Genji monogatari no honsei (sono ichi)—,” Genji monōgatari hyōshaku, ed. Takuya Tamagami, vol. 13 (Tōkyō: Kadokawa Shoten, 1964–1969), passim.

19. Aileen Gatten, “The Order of the Early Chapters in the Genji monogatari,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41(1), 1981, passim.

20. See Okada, Bowring, and Shirane, passim. Richard Okada, Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in The Tale of Genji and Other Mid-Heian Texts, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Richard John Bowring, Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, Landmarks of World Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

21. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 20–22.

22. Bowring, Murasaka Shikibu, p. 81.

23. Okada, Figures of Resistence, p. 20. Teika lamented, “As there was not an authoritative text, I inquired about in an attempt to obtain one. I compared various texts, but all were in the worst state of disorder, fraught with omissions and obscurities” (Bowring, p. 84).

24. Takehiko Noguchi, “Genji monogatari” o Edo kara yomu (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1985), p. 90.

25. Masashi Nishizawa, Genji monogatari o shiru jiten, (Tōkyō: Tōkyōdō Shuppan, 1998), p. 233. See also Uesaka Nobuo on several television versions. Nobuo Uesaka, Genji monogatari no shii. Josetsu (Tōkyō: Yūbun Shoin, 1982), p. 390.

26. Akio Abe and Yutaka Yamanaka, “Genji monogatari no miryoku,” in Genji monogatari no shiteki kenkyū, ed. Yutaka Yamanaka (Tōkyō: Shibunkaku, 1997), p. 425.

27. Nishizawa, Genji monogatari o shiru jiten, p. 230.

28. Yukio Mishima and Harumi Setouchi, “Genji monogatari to gendai,” in Hihyō shūsei Genji monogatari, ed. Akiyama Ken, vol. 3 (Tōkyō: Yumani Shoten, 1999), p. 177.

29. Ivan I. Morris, The World of the Shining Prince; Court Life in Ancient Japan, (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 279.

30. Rintarō (Ōgai) Mori, “Shinyaku Genji monogatari jo,” in Hihyō shūsei Genji monogatari, p. 92.

31. “And for Genji there are many writings that shorten and clarify the plot. But even if you know the interpretations and the plot outline, it doesn’t mean that you will necessarily enjoy the entirety of the work.” Yoshio Yamada, “Tanizaki-shi to Genji monogatari—kōetsusha no kotoba,” in Hihyō shūsei Genji monogatari, p. 282. This concept is also expressed in Ueda Bin’s introduction to Yosano’s gendaigoyaku twenty years earlier. “In order to enjoy the voluptuous beauty of the entirety, generally, people will inevitably desire a modernization. I think that this is the raison d’etre of Yosano Akiko’s modernization.” Bin Ueda, “Shinyaku Genji monogatari jo,” in Hihyō shūsei Genji monogatari, p. 96.

32. Fumiko Enchi and Shikibu Murasaki, Genji monogatari, Shinchō bunko, vol. 1, 6 vols. (Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 1979), pp. 3–4. She also recalls the experience as one of going through a “steep, long mountain tunnel.”

33. Ibid.

34. Julie Candler Hayes, “Look but don’t read: Chinese characters and the translating drive from John Wilkins to Peter Greenaway,” Modern Language Quarterly, September 1999, p. 354.

35. Yamada, “Tanizaki-shi to Genji monogatari—kōetsusha no kotoba,” p. 281.

36. Takuya Tamagami, “Keigo no bungakuteki kōsatsu—Genji monogatari no honsei (sono ni),” in Genji monogatari hyōshaku, ed. Takuya Tamagami, vol. 13 (Tōkyō: Kadokawa Shoten, 1964–1969), p. 143.

37. Musubana Kitamura, “Genji monogatari no henyō—gendaigoyakuron—1,” Kindai 65(12), 1988, p. 77.

38. Ken Akiyama, “Mirai wo hiraku chie no hōten,” in Genji monogatari, eds. A. Abe, Ken Akiyama, G. Imai and H. Suzuki, vol. 20, Nihon koten bungaku zenshu (Tōkyō: Shogakkan, 1994), p. 3.

39. Ibid.

40. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 273.

41. Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” p. 181.

42. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, “Nikumare kuchi,” in Hihyō shūsei Genji monogatari, p. 135.

43. See G. G. Rowley, “Textual malfeasance in Yosano Akiko’s Shin’yaku Genji monogatari,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 58(1), 1998, and Fumiko Enchi, Genji monogatari shiken, Shinchō bunko (Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 1974) passim.

44. Ueda, “Shinyaku Genji monogatari jo,” 94. Ōgai follows suit, “If you ask who among our generation is a person suitable for translating Genji monogatari the people, there is probably no one but Yosano Akiko.” (Mori, “Shinyaku Genji monogatari jo,” p. 92).

45. Mishima and Setouchi, “Genji monogatari to gendai,” p. 177.

46. Tanizaki, “Nikumare kuchi,” p. 137.

47. Enchi, Genji monogatari, p. 6.

48. Ibid., p. 7.

49. Naoko Okada, “ ‘Genji kuyō’ jōge maki—Hashimoto Osamu: Watashi no kaita hon—Intabyū,” Fujin kōron 79(5), 1994, pp. 358–9.

50. Noguchi, “Genji monogatari” o Edo kara yomu, p. 206.

51. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), passim.