The Honor of Translating The Tale of GenjiMy title this evening may promise a talk about the honor of translating The Taleof Genji, but I must begin by thanking the Donald Keene Center of Japanese
Culture for quite another honor: that of inviting me to give this year’s Sen
Soshitsu XV Lecture in the first place. Never in my life did I imagine myself being
invited to give a public lecture at Columbia.
Actually, when the Donald Keene Center first asked me whether I might be able
to be in New York in April 2009, for an unspecified event, I said no. It’s just too
far, I said. Only months later did I learn what the event was. The message that
identified it (the Sen Lecture had never occurred to me) also offered an
enticement: Professor Keene, it said, would be especially pleased if I were able toaccept. So here I am.
The Center asked me particularly to talk about translating The Tale of Genji. Afterthe Genji millennium year of 2008 I had been planning not to talk any more
about the tale, and in any case, I seldom discuss translation; but this wasdifferent. Translating The Tale of Genji certainly was quite an experience, andnow that that experience is over, and my fifteen or sixteen years of publicly
visible preoccupation with the work are slipping into the past, I felt that for theoccasion I could indeed look back over it one more time. “Honor” is the first wordthat came to mind, to sum it up. “Pleasure” came next. “Labor” could havefollowed, I suppose, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me.
I’ll start by quoting the sixteenth century poet and man of letters Étienne de laBoétie, the great friend of Michel de Montaigne. La Boétie wrote in the verse
preface to a translation from Italian that he did for his wife:
Jamais plaisir je n’ai pris à changer
En nostre langue aucun œuvre estranger :Car à tourner d’une langue estrangere

2
La peine est grande et la gloire est legere.
To paraphrase him, he said that he didn’t enjoy translating from anotherlanguage into his own because it’s a lot of work and you get very little
recognition for it. If I’m an exception to his rule about recognition, that’s only
because of the extraordinarily famous work and author that I translated. In
general La Boétie was of course quite right and still is, although fortunatelytranslators keep translating prose and poetry anyway.
La Boétie went on to say that he’d much rather write something of his own, even
if it wasn’t as good as what he might translate. He wrote:
J’ayme trop mieux de moymesmes ecrire
Quelque escript mien, encore qu’il soit pire.
I can imagine feeling that way, if I were he. However, I don’t seem to be able towrite anything of my own. When I was young I wanted to write, but I could never
get anything out. Every page remained stubbornly blank, or nearly so. So
translating has been for me the only way to work with and discover my own
language, somewhat in the manner of a writer.
Of course, translation has also given me a way of exploring and learning theJapanese language, especially Classical Japanese. I first noticed my interest intranslation some forty-five years ago, when Donald Keene assigned each student
in his “Readings in Noh” course a Noh play to translate. My translation came backlargely rewritten in pencil by the master, and with good reason. Nonetheless, I
knew that I wanted to keep trying.
Perhaps I would not have translated that much if I had soon learned to readClassical Japanese fluently and accurately. However, translation long remained
my only way of discovering in detail what a worthwhile text actually said. Thiswas still true when I accepted the challenge of The Tale of Genji. A major reason
for doing so was the wish to find out for myself what Murasaki Shikibu had
written. Another was, of course, aspiration to higher achievement. The Tale ofGenji was for me a great mountain, and I wanted very much to climb it if I could.

3
I had the idea that before translating the tale I should read it through in theoriginal. So I set out to do that. My conscientious policy was never to turn to thenext page until I had a good grasp of the page I was on. In this spirit I got about
half way through the work. By then the time to begin translating had clearlycome, so I went back to the first chapter. That was when I discovered that I
hadn’t really understood a single line of what I had read. Yes, as they say, theoriginal of The Tale of Genji is quite difficult. So by translating it I successfully
learned to read it a little better and to express better, in my own language, what I
gathered it had to say.
Étienne de la Boétie dismissed translation a little summarily, I think, when hewent on, “Little wisdom indeed has he who enriches himself with the wealth ofothers.”Bien a vrayment celuy peu de sagesse,
Du bien d’autruy qui se fait sa richesse.
But many accomplished poets seem drawn to translation precisely because
translation extends and enriches the range of their own thinking and language,
and poses a challenge that they feel called to answer. Perhaps fewer establishednovelists translate novels, but the same must be true when they do. You probably
know that several distinguished twentieth-century Japanese writers, including
one of my predecessors as a Sen lecturer, devoted years of their lives totranslating The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. Two even translated it morethan once. The tale has a great deal to give anyone who seeks such intimate
acquaintance with it. Sometimes I think that the translator of a great literarywork resembles an actor performing a great role, or a soloist performing a greatpiece of music. Naturally not every performance will satisfy everyone, not eventhe performer; but it is a fine thing to engage closely with such a work and toseek to do it justice before the world, in a voice that is inevitably one’s own.
My ambition to translate The Tale of Genji seems to have been blessed from thestart. Naturally there were difficulties along the way, but for some unfathomablereason the gods seemed eager time and again to make sure that everything went
well in the end.

4

For one thing, like any translator into English I had such a large potential
audience. There are so many people who read English. For most languages, one
translation of The Tale of Genji would be plenty, but English has room for three,
and there will no doubt be more. I can’t help thinking of my friend Kai Niemenen,
who is translating the tale into Finnish. Now that is true dedication to the art ofliterary translation. And for another thing, I was following in the footsteps of
Arthur Waley, whose genius established the tale long ago in English as great
literature, and to whom every subsequent English translator remains indebted.
In this connection I think of the Russian translator, Tatiana Sokolova-Delyusina.
Tatiana had no prepared soil to plant her work in, and by now it is unfortunately
out of print.
More than anything else, though, I doubt that any translator into any language
has enjoyed the kind of support and good fortune that kept coming my way. It all
started with my initial visit to the then Penguin Classics editor in London. He was
far more interested than I expected him to be, and on leaving the building I felt as
though I were setting out toward a new life. Then I boarded a tube train. In thesterile, fluorescently lit space of the car I found myself sitting opposite anindescribably beautiful woman. I could hardly believe my eyes. She was smilinggently to herself. Her astonishing presence there suggested some sort of divine
approval.
Not that things went smoothly right away. For some time administration kept mefrom the work that I longed to do. But to my amazement, and to that of mycolleagues, I soon received a three-year Australian Research Council grant topursue the translation. This was a miracle. Even more miraculous was being
given teaching relief, since normally these grants gave the so-called “principal
investigator” only lab equipment and research assistant time. I got three halfyears off teaching. I still had to apply for a research assistant, though, just to beable to reach the minimum grant threshold. Alas, my wife, Susan, was the only
qualified candidate. She more than earned her salary.

5
A second three-year term of the same grant was another miracle. I had hit
precisely the right years to apply. No application either earlier or later would
have yielded anything. And in the meantime, thanks to Barbara Ruch and the late
Kawai Hayao I was invited to spend 1997 at the International Research Center
for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, to continue my translation work full-time.
Unfortunately, Susan had to stay behind on our farm in Australia, between
Canberra and sea. It was a year of drought so severe that she had to dig a pit in
the creek bed to get water—drought punctuated by a huge rainstorm that left
her flooded in for days and by a lightning strike that melted the telephone.
Meanwhile, things were not going that well with Penguin in London. The Classics
Editor of the time seemed to have emigrated to the dark side of the moon. I’d all
but given up when a senior editor I knew at Penguin in New York did what
needed to be done. Wendy Wolf felt so strongly about the project that she simply
announced to Penguin in London that she was taking it over. After that,everything changed.
Penguin was then beginning to revamp its old Classics line and to publish majorclassics in a high-quality format. Until then my Genji translation had been due tocome out in several standard Classics volumes, and I’d been hoping to findoutside funding for some simple illustrations. But Wendy wanted to do better
than that, and the success of Robert Fagles’s Homer convinced the publisher toagree. Suddenly, there was money for the illustrations I wanted and for a twovolume hard-back boxed set, to be followed by the high-quality paperback thatyou know.
An advance copy of the hard-back edition was sitting in the Hudson Street officesof Penguin USA, ready to mail to me, on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Needless to say, it stayed where it was for some time. After receiving it I visited
New York as soon as I could, and met the whole editing and production team. It
was a moving occasion, especially under those circumstances. Everyone involved
told me what a pleasure it had been to work on The Tale of Genji. The chief copy
editor, who had worked for years in Tokyo, described it as a once-in-a-lifetime

6experience. The production manager had called in a favor to upgrade the qualityof the paper. The art director had spent all night digitizing the cover material I
was able to send him at the very last minute, and he did a wonderful job. And
Wendy Wolf had outdone herself in orchestrating the entire effort.
By pure coincidence, my translation came out just before the world premiere, in
Los Angeles, of a blockbuster anniversary production by one of the major
Japanese movie studios: Genji monogatari sennen no koi (“The Tale of Genji: A
Thousand Years of Love”). In reality, that overseas premiere was a domestic
Japanese publicity event, and, alas, Sennen no koi turned out to be a truly awful
movie. It was all quite exciting at the time, though. I even thought of attending
the premiere. Fortunately, I didn’t.
And the Genji tide rolled on. Just as I had never imagined the release of Sennen no
koi in 2001, I had never imagined, either, the Genji millennium of 2008. Over a
thousand events of all kinds were held in Japan to mark the occasion. The
millennium brought together many of us with Genji connections to Kyoto, fromsixteen different countries. That was quite an event.
People have often asked me what was most difficult about translating The Tale ofGenji. I usually start with the poetry. In Japan, questioners want particularly toknow how I handled the word plays in the poems. I confess immediately that
there are no word plays—kakekotoba and so on—in my poem translations. I did
not even try. I felt that the chances of success were too slim, and besides, I did
not want to distract the reader with unfamiliar, unexpected difficulties. In theJapan of the past, the poems were often seen as more important than the prose,
but in English for a general audience, and even perhaps in modern Japanese, thebalance is the other way round. I aimed only to give each poem sufficientdistinction of form and style that it stood out a little against the background of
the surrounding prose.
The main problem was finding the right form. At first I doubted my ability totranslate the poems effectively, and so I tried to make them as discreet as7possible. Unfortunately, while translating Chapter 42 I realized that I had painted
myself into a corner, fallen into a hopeless rut, etc. I was bored to death with theway I was handling the poems. So I went back to the beginning and redid them. I
decided to adopt the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable-count format of the original, not because
I thought that it would succeed particularly well, but because it would at least
show that I had tried. I also laid it out in two lines rather than five so as not tobreak up the prose too much. Some readers probably never notice the syllablecount format of the poems, especially since the count does not always work
properly unless the translation is voiced right. But that can’t be helped. Some ofthe poems turned out much better than I had imagined, but of course there are
failures, too.
The prose was a challenge, as I’ve said. Still, I usually tell people quite truthfully
that an even greater challenge was working out the right way to say in mylanguage what I already knew the original meant. There are so many, many ways
to express the simplest thought, and each gives that thought a more or lessdistinct character. I had an idea of the character I wanted to give mytranslation—an idea of how the whole should sound—but the right note for any
particular phrase was often difficult to catch, if I could catch it at all. Sometimes I
felt as though I just didn’t have an adequate command of English.
If the original Japanese often challenged me less than the English, that is only
because I had so much help. As far as I know, Arthur Waley had little to go on
except his innate genius and the glosses in the late seventeenth-century
Kogetsushô edition of the text. Kogetsushô is a remarkable work for its time, but I
still have no idea how he achieved what he did. Edward Seidensticker had a moreresources, especially the old Nihon koten bungaku taikei edition from the late
1950s, but even so I can only admire what he managed to do. I had three recent,state-of-the-art editions, one of which includes an authoritative modern Japanesetranslation designed to help the reader understand the original line by line. At
first I resolutely avoided looking at this translation, which appears in smaller
type directly under the original. Nonetheless, my eye sometimes wandered down
to it, and now and again what I found there surprised me. After confidently

8translating a passage, I’d notice at the bottom of the page a thoroughly unfamiliar
counterpart line. Sure enough, I’d gotten lost. These early experiences were asalutary warning to accept all the help I could get.
I soon learned also to be grateful for the work of the scholars of the past. Many
notes in even the most recent editions convey information or suggest readings
first proposed centuries ago. Genji scholarship is at least eight hundred years old.
As I sought to bring a passage into focus, it was a pleasure to look back over such
depths of time and to realize how many predecessors had done the same and left
their understanding to later generations.
One more frequently asked question, especially in Japan, concerns my favorite
heroine in the tale. Who is she? I always say Murasaki. I gave that answer once ata lunch with several women who belonged to a linked verse circle. “Aha!” thequestioner snorted, “you would, wouldn’t you! Men always do.” That brought me
up short. “What’s wrong with liking Murasaki?” I wanted to protest, but I was
already feeling guilty, and I suspected that I knew the answer anyway. So I
stayed out of the gender wars and let the matter drop. I’ll add, though, that forme the lady from Akashi is a particularly moving, fascinating figure. So is Rokujô,
of course. So is Utsusemi in her way. And, yes, Suetsumuhana, and the rest—with
the exception, perhaps, of the Third Princess. And I cannot leave this subject
without mentioning Fujitsubo. I know something about Fujitsubo from my own
experience, and I often wondered, while translating the early chapters, how theauthor managed to understand such things so perfectly.
Sometimes people also ask me what is my favorite chapter. I have two:“Suetsumuhana” (“The Safflower”) and “Minori” (“The Law,” or, in Edward
Seidensticker’s translation, “The Rites”). The former, mingling as it does wit withsympathy, is an example of the very highest kind of comic writing. As for“Minori,” it is the deeply moving chapter that describes Murasaki’s death.
However, relatively few chapters in the tale lend themselves to being isolated
this way from the rest. Some contain memorable passages but do not stand well

9on their own, and sometimes an important theme surfaces sporadically in a
succession of chapters. That is why it is difficult to explain coherently why I feelso strongly about the part of the tale that aroused my greatest enthusiasm. I had
been studiously translating away, line by line, for hundreds of pages by the time I
reached Chapter 36 (“Kashiwagi,” “The Oak Tree”), without ever registering the
cumulative effect that then burst into my consciousness. I was overwhelmed. I
remember rushing out of my study and exclaiming to my wife, “This is beyond
anything! If The Tale of Genji is famous for anything at all, it should be famous forthis! This is what lifts it into the company of the few greatest books ever written!”That moment was, for me, the high point of the whole process of translating thetale. A great deal in The Tale of Genji is moving, witty, impressive, or variously
attractive, but the story told in the middle part of the book, building as it does on
all that precedes it, left an impression—no, an experience—of extraordinary
depth and tragic grandeur. It convinced me that the tale’s intrinsic quality is evengreater than its high reputation.
Anyway, after this interlude I’ll return now to the business of understanding theoriginal well enough to be able to translate it properly. I think of this problem interms of diction and meaning.
Two translations equally accurate in lexical and grammatical meaning—translations of a passage of speech, for example—can convey very different
impressions. Which impression, then, is the right one? Is the speaker the selfcentered twit of translation one, or the well-intentioned gentleman of translation
two? Word choice and diction can make that much difference. Perhaps neither isdemonstrably truer to an original written in a dead language, countless nuancesof which were forgotten centuries ago. Still, the translator must make take aposition on the issue. Is an utterance ironic, or not? Does it convey vulgarity, or
mockery? If it does, then the translation should do so, too. But does it? The
decision is bound up with interpretation of what the author meant to say and of
the way the original audience might have taken the passage, and it can
profoundly affect reading in the long run. So I would like to plead for including

10
diction and tone under the heading of accuracy, imponderable though these may
often be.
Actually, diction and tone are not unrelated to lexical accuracy. The vocabulary of
The Tale of Genji is relatively restricted. Some common words function morevariously in the narrative than any single English word could possibly do, andrelatively low lexical variety may make it difficult, centuries after the author’stime, to know exactly what shade or flavor of meaning is intended. Relationships
between words, and between especially significant words and their wider
context, seem open in character and indeterminate in outline. Hence, I suppose,the famous “suggestiveness” of this language, which really does invite, in fact
require, reader participation in the attribution of flavor and meaning.
Perhaps this is partly why scholars who quote The Tale of Genji in English often
provide their own translation of the quoted passage. It is not necessarily thatthey disapprove of the existing translations. Rather, the passage in question does
not say in those translations exactly what the scholar quoting it wants it to say—or, better, believes that it does say. This discrepancy also explains the occasional
practice of quoting one passage in one established translation and the next
passage in another, depending on how well either supports the writer’sargument.
I say all this without reproach to anyone, because I have done the same thing as
the scholars who make their own translations. I translated every page as
carefully as I could, but whenever I then focused on a particular passage, for the
purpose of quoting it in an essay, I found my wording somewhat blurred andinadequate. Each time I felt the need to sharpen the focus in order to bring out
more clearly what I believed the passage really said. Or should that be, “to bringout more clearly what I wanted it to say”? Again and again I pondered thisquestion, confident that no one could charge me with mistranslation, yet
uncertain whether the author herself, and certainly her intended audience,
would have recognized such sparkling precision. Often my thoughts went to theauthor of the eleventh-century Sarashina nikki (“As I Crossed a Bridge of11Dreams” in Ivan Morris’s translation) and her account of herself as a young girl,deeply absorbed in reading The Tale of Genji. What was she getting out of it?
Probably not la fine fleur of interpretation nursed into intricate bloom by eight
hundred years of devoted scholarship. So where to draw the line between sober
accuracy and informed but somewhat eager imagination?
Still, something must be done in any translation, into any language, to give thenarrative a clarity of outline that it may very well have had, after all, for an
original audience with living access to the court lore and idiom of the early
eleventh century. In any case, English requires choices between singular andplural, definite or indefinite article, “he” or “she,” and so on. So the translator
constantly makes informed decisions—or, occasionally, fails to notice that adecision is needed. A decision made or missed may make a significant difference
for any reader disposed to give the narrative and its content careful thought.
One such moment comes in Chapter 2 (“Hahakigi,” “The Broom Tree”). It isfamous, and I apologize to those of you who know all about it already. Thatdevastatingly charming young scoundrel, Genji, has carried Utsusemi, a married
woman, into the neighboring room, where the obvious next move either does ordoes not follow. Do they, or don’t they? Sex has long been as delicate a subject inJapan as elsewhere, and perhaps in order to uphold the respectability of thework, some of the old commentaries deny that they do. Others say nothing.
Modern materials on the subject are often discreet, and translations may tread a
middle path, leaving the matter up to the reader. The question hangs on a single
verb that occurs in Genji’s thoughts about what has, or has not, just taken place.
Does this verb mean clearly that they didn’t make love? Is it irreducibly
ambiguous? Or is it unambiguously explicit? I racked my brains over this one fora long time. There was something wrong with the picture. Finally it came to me.
This utterly general-purpose verb, used precisely that way, in that precise
context, was perfectly clear. Genji was not feeling glad to have met Utsusemi, tohave been able to spend time with her, and so on. He was glad to have possessed
her. Recent scholarship on the tale, as I was then relieved to discover, openly
reads the verb this way. I tell this story only in order to comment on the12apparent “suggestiveness” of the tale’s language. Sometimes it is indeed mainlyin the eye of the reader, and due largely to incomplete grasp of idiom and context.
Another example illustrates how significant, and yet how slippery, the mostinnocuous-looking phrase can be. You remember that, in the next-to-last chapterof the tale, some monks come across a young woman known as Ukifune. Theyfind her lying on the ground in a sort of trance. Now, when the reader last saw
Ukifune, she seriously meant to drown herself that night in the nearby river. But
here she is. Apparently she didn’t drown after all. So what did happen to her?
Soon, in a flicker of lucidity, she asks those looking after her either to throw her(for the first time) into the river, or to throw her back into the river. There is no“back” in the original, but that proves nothing, because the language has no
casually spoken way to say it. In other words, there would be no “back” even if“back” were meant. For this reason there is absolutely nothing wrong with
Edward Seidensticker’s translation, “throw me back in the river.” It is completely
legitimate. Understanding of the original phrase depends entirely on theperceived context—that is, on how the reader or translator understands what
actually happened to Ukifune. When Professor Seidensticker made histranslation virtually all readers, including scholars, seem to have taken it for
granted that Ukifune threw herself into the river but was swept downstream by
the current and washed ashore, alive, at the spot where the monks found her. No
wonder he shared that view. Most general readers still do. However, specialist
opinion now disagrees, and that change can affect one’s understanding of
Ukifune and her fate. I only wish we could ask the young lady evoked inSarashina nikki what she thought about all this.
I have been talking about precision, discovered or perhaps sometimes, justpossibly, imagined. Now I will turn for a moment to imprecision, indirection, or
studied discretion. While translating the tale I often avoided precise usage or
explicit vocabulary in order not to misrepresent the original. Discretion andindirect, or euphemistic, expression are fundamental to aristocratic discourse, in
The Tale of Genji as elsewhere. It was not always easy to convey them fairly.
Calling a spade a spade is much easier than suggesting a spade without naming it.

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The idea of “marriage” is an example. Although the narrative is often concernedwith absorbing issues surrounding marriage, it has no single lexical item foreither “marry” or “marriage.” Therefore my translation has none, either. Perhaps
marriage, like the spade, was too sensitive an issue even to name. The same
seems to have been true, in Genji language at least, of the desire to leave theworld and enter religion. Genji thinks repeatedly about leaving the world,
although he never actually does so. The language offers a specific word for thisstep, but that word does not occur in the tale. Instead, the original text has Genji
think about “acting on his long-standing desire.” The light, unassuming word forthis “long-standing desire,” hoi, is as close as the author wished to come tonaming the spade. I respected her discretion. Genji’s brother, Suzaku, conceived
the same desire and acted on it in the end. I will never forget my astonishment
when I discovered that, in her modern Japanese translation published in 1939, a
famous Japanese writer had had Suzaku “enter upon the life of religious faith.”
The four-character compound she used, directly imported from modern
intellectual discourse, weighed rhetorically like a teaspoonful of neutron star.
My most pervasively visible effort to respect the discretion and perspective ofthe tale’s narrator appears in my treatment of names and other personal
appellations. Having discussed this topic in the introduction to my translation, I
won’t say much about it here. I knew that I was taking a risk, even though I did
all I could think of to keep the conscientious reader fully informed. Sure enough,some readers complained, although I know that others approved. Given the way I
approached the tale, I couldn’t have done otherwise, and so I have no regrets.
There certainly were some tight spots, though. I especially remember the firstmeeting between Murasaki and the lady from Akashi, neither of whom of course
had a name. Feminine pronouns were about all I had to work with. I still wonder
whether I really got away with that one.
My approach to the text forced this treatment of the names on me because I
could not help understanding and situating every word in the context of thenarrative as a whole. I was too acutely conscious of how, in the terms of the text
itself, the convenient, traditional nicknames would affect the relations between

14
the characters. This matter, too, I have explained in print. I mention it only
because my approach to reading affected not only my treatment of the names,
but also the way I understood, hence translated, certain words and expressions.
I don’t always remember that well the works I translate from Japanese or, once,from French. Fiction, folktales, literary scholarship—their content floats in mymemory in dwindling, disconnected fragments. Sometimes, however, somethingvital stirs in me, deeper down. This happened with the texts of the Noh theater,
as it did with The Tale of Genji. In these cases I began to detect, at firstunconsciously, the workings of a spacious, informing intelligence. I glimpsed, or
felt I glimpsed, subterranean patterns. With respect to Noh, I came to see in theplays associated with Zeami a coherent network of themes and imagery quitedistinct from the work of any other Noh playwright, and somehow more fully
alive. No doubt my vision was subjective and unscholarly, but it was alsofascinating.
Something like that also happened with The Tale of Genji. I began glimpsing in it
large-scale patterns that affected the way I translated, or, in the case I am about
to discuss, should have translated even discreet phrases. For me, these patterns
give depth and coherence to a work that readers often see as fragmented andepisodic. They also fill me with admiration, as they did in the case of Zeami, forthe genius of the author.
So I now have a translator’s story to tell. It concerns Genji and his elder brother,Emperor and then Retired Emperor Suzaku.
Last July I re-read Chapter 34 in the original. “Spring Shoots I,” the first “Wakana”
chapter, is long and contains some of the author’s greatest writing. It begins withall the complexities that lead Genji to marry Suzaku’s favorite daughter, theThird Princess. In the process, Suzaku first considers marrying her to Genji’s son,Yûgiri; and while talking to Yûgiri with this outcome in mind, he looks back overthe past. A few words particularly caught my attention, and I checked my15published translation to see what I had done with them. In my printed version,
Suzaku had said,
As Emperor myself, however, I discovered limits to what I could do,
and while your father still meant a great deal to me personally, a little
slip of his came to earn me his displeasure…
The footnote that glossed “a little slip of his” explained, “Presumably Genji’s
misadventure with Oborozukiyo.” (I trust you remember the moment when
Oborozukiyo’s father discovers Genji in bed with his daughter.)What? I exclaimed to myself. Why, that’s wrong! By then, you see, I had moreexperience reading the language of the tale than I did when I wrote those words,
and I had also thought more about the work. I just knew (or so I felt) what thosewords meant: not “a little slip of his,” but “a little slip of mine,” or “a little fault on
my part.” I also knew that the “little” was a euphemism—a kind of euphemismthat the speaker can use only of something serious that he has done against his
better judgment. For these reasons I now heard Suzaku saying, “…a mostunfortunate error of mine came to earn me your father’s displeasure.” He wasreferring not to Genji’s escapade with Oborozukiyo, but to his own failure toward
Genji. Far from honoring the solemn injunction of their father, the Kiritsubo
Emperor, to honor Genji and seek his advice, Suzaku as reigning emperor had
failed utterly to stand up to his mother and resist her fury against his brother—afury that had stripped Genji of rank and office and driven him into exile; andSuzaku had failed again whenever he wanted to recall Genji to the Capital, andhis mother prevented him from doing so.
You understand, I’m sure, that no pronoun or other grammatical device in theoriginal specifies whose fault, still less what fault, is meant. The precision that
another language might convey grammatically is instead, I believe,
communicated entirely by the narrative context and the understanding of social
practice shared by the author’s intended audience. Retired Emperor Suzaku is amodest, honorable man who knows his own limitations, but who also
understands the role and dignity of the sovereign. Now he is about to leave theworld and become a monk, in order to be able spend his remaining days praying

16
for rebirth in Amida’s paradise. Before he does so, however, he must find asuitable husband for the daughter whom he loves more than anything else in theworld. Yûgiri is a promising candidate. Would Suzaku allude under suchcircumstances to an old misdeed of Yûgiri’s father? Would he not, rather,
discreetly acknowledge responsibility for a graver one of his own, long ago,
toward the young man’s father, in the hope of now laying all that past to rest forhimself, for Genji, and for Yûgiri? I could go on this way for some time, taking
other aspects of the distant and proximate context into account. Perhaps thatmuch will do, however, to suggest what is at stake in this pair of contrastingtranslations. The first issue is Suzaku’s character in the narrative as a whole andat this stage in his life. The second is the nature of the relationship between him
and Genji—the longest relationship between Genji and any other figure in thetale.
The mistake—at least as I saw it—seemed so obvious on this re-reading that I
wondered why I had ever made it. So I consulted the annotated edition that I had
relied on most. Sure enough, the note at that spot identified the lapse, or fault, asGenji’s carrying on with Oborozukiyo. Then I checked the other authoritative
edition, the one that I had used less often. The note identified the fault as
Suzaku’s in exiling Genji. The note in the first edition now seemed to me simply
wrong.
The issue being significant, I posted a message on an e-mail discussion list
devoted to pre-modern Japanese studies, acknowledging and explaining what I
described as a translation error. A long debate followed—one so intense thatsome of the participants must sometimes have struggled, as I did, in order torestrain their tempers.
Some saw no reason to believe that Suzaku was responsible for any wrong doneto Genji, since Suzaku was then too much under his mother’s influence to haveany effective power at all. One voice held that Genji’s escapade with Oborozukiyo
must be the issue, if any, considering how Suzaku himself felt about Oborozukiyo.
However, the most interesting objection, sustained through thick and thin by the17most vocal combatant, was that Suzaku was not blaming Genji or himself foranything in particular. Instead, he was merely acknowledging vaguely that
unspecified errors had been committed by parties unnamed. Supporting his
position by citing medieval commentaries, and arguing that counter-citations
from the same commentaries did not mean what they seemed to mean, thislearned opponent accused modern scholars of over-interpreting the tale andintroducing into their glosses a degree of precision imagined neither by theauthor nor by the scholarly readers of a time after all far closer to the author’s
than ours. It was flattering to be caught up in this mass arrest, for fraud, of thegods of modern Genji studies. As I said earlier, however, I was sensitive to thepossibility of over-interpretation, and secretly I respected my opponent’s caution.
I didn’t let on, though. And it’s true: I wasn’t convinced. Neither side budged, andeventually the debate just died. But there the problem is. In the absence ofgrammatical and lexical precision, only context can further define the meaning of
this passage. But what is the relevant context? What does it include? How far
does it go? Is it confined to the bounds of the sentence? Does it take in the whole
scene? Does its fabric stretch back, chapter after chapter, to events—but whichones?—that now are painful memories from years ago? Does it reach even into
the accepted manners of the court, that is to say, into questions of what can or
cannot properly be said, and when, by or to whom?
For me, being the person I am, it stretches far and wide, to take in much of thetale and its world. So I stand by my correction, not because vocabulary or
grammar conclusively prove it right, since they do not, or because someauthorities favor it after all, but because it is plausible, fruitful, and a credit to theauthor and her work. To catch it, even too late, is a translator’s pleasure andprivilege, and to speak of it is to declare again the scope and greatness of the tale.
With that, I will close my talk. As always when I discuss The Tale of Genji, I feel as
though I have left too much out. But perhaps I have managed at least to convey
how absorbing the experience of translating the tale was, and how it continued
to absorb me even after the job was done. Only now, seven and a half years after

18
publication, do I feel that I have done everything I could, within my limits, torequite the honor of spending eight years putting this masterpiece into my own,
imperfect words.