num_pages: 1090
description: 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 transaltion 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 themselvees. There have been translations of very great writers by very great writers, and they have been superseded.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 the Waley translation "has continued to be so great that the process of preparing a new translation felt like sacrilege."
language: English
title: The Tale Of Genji
titlecomplete: The Tale Of Genji
characters: To no Chujo, Yugiri, Murasaki, Genji, Fujitsubo
genres: Fiction, Historical, Asia, Japan, Japanese Literature, Literature, Classics, Romance, Novels, Historical Fiction
ratings_count: 12934
places: Japan
series: 源氏物語  , El Relato de Genji (Traducción APJ), The Tale of Genji
publisher: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc.