| NOTA |
(★)´The Tale of Genji´ has long been known to discerning readers as Japan´s greatest work of literature and as one of the world´s greatest novels. Written in the early years of the eleventh century by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu, it achieved its first fame in the West some five decades ago, when Arthur Waley´s famous translation revealed an unsuspected world of elegance and romance centering around court life in tenth-century Japan. From the time of its original appearance in English, it has delighted countless readers, who find in it the same sort of pleasures they find in works like Proust´s ´Remembrance of Things Past.´ Indeed, Waley´s translation came to be a classic in its own right. Now, from the skilled hand of Edward Seidensticker, ´The Tale of Genji´ emerges in a new translation --one that does not seek to supplant Waley´s but to reflect with more accuracy and with less elaboration the work that Lady Murasaki actually created. As Mr. Seidensticker says in his introduction, ´New translations of great classics need not seek to justify themselves. There have been translations of very great writers by very great writers, and they have been superseded. Since there is no perfect translation of a complex literary work, the more translations, one would think, the better.´ At the same time, Mr. Seidensticker makes it clear that the power of Waley´s translation ´has continued to be so great that the process of preparing a new translation has felt like sacrilege.´ The reader, of course, will have to make his own judgment, but for those who already know ´The Tale of Genji´ in its earlier English version, this new version has innumerable interesting and delightful revelations. For those who are making their first acquaintance with the novel, no better introduction could be sought than the one presented in Mr. Seidensticker´s masterly work. The publisher takes the greatest of pleasure in offering it here in a faithful paperback reproduction. (◆)Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki, was undoubtedly one of the earliest women novelists in the world. She was born about one thousand years ago. In addition to writing her celebrated novel, she kept a diary, which still exists. Her service at court began early in the eleventh century. (◆)Edward Seidensticker, professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan, is a noted translator. He has translated a number of works by Tanizaki Junichiro and Yasunari Kawabata, one of which --Kawabata´s ´The Sound of the Mountain´-- won the National Book Award for Translation in 1970. He is also the author of several books in English and Japanese and has received from the Japanese government one of its highest honors, the third-class Order of the Rising Sun, for his part in introducing Japanese novels abroad.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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