Annotator And Seidensticker Translation

Annotator and Translator Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji in classical Japanese, a language quite different from modern English. Besides their linguistic differences, conventionally people wrote classical Japanese vertically, and did not have modern punctuations nor modern concepts of paragraph. Therefore, translators face not only the task of choosing the appropriate words to convey the ambiguity of Murasaki Shikibu’s language, but also the task of separating the text into paragraphs and supplementing punctuations. The two translations I am going to talk about in this paper, Tyler’s translation and Seidensticker’s translation, approach these two issues differently and therefore offer two ways to interpret and to experience the text.

In the opening sentence of Chapter Eight, while Tyler specifies the time as “a little past the twentieth of the second month” (Tyler, 152), Seidensticker simply states “toward the end of the Second Month.” Furthermore, while Tyler does not translate the site of the party and retains the original name “Shishinden,” Seidensticker translates the name as the Grand Hall. I am not going to argue which one is more authentic, because authenticity is not a clear-cut concept and is often subject to personal preference. What I want to point out here is that, Seidensticker’s decision not to retain the extra detail of the time and the original name of the palace exemplify his attitude towards translation: he does not only translate The Tale of Genji, he also rewrites it to make it more accessible to modern readers. In this way, readers of these two translations are going to have two different conception of time and space about the story. On the one hand, readers of Tyler’s translation may feel a little distanced by the name of the place Shishinden which has a meaning in its own, but does not mean much to readers without prior exposure to Japanese language. On the other hand, readers of Seidensticker’s translation may feel more at ease and

In Seidensticker’s translation, after reporting the Empress’s poem, the narrator “How then did it go the rounds and presently reach me?” However, in Tyler’s translation, the narrator is not very present: “One wonders how anyone could have passed on words meant only for herself” (Tyler, 154). Such interjection makes Seidensticker’s narrator more personal, and the novel more accessible. Seidensticker’s narrator is present somewhere else. Although both narrators in Seidensticker’s and Tyler’s translations are omniscient narrators, the one in Seidensticker’s translation is more willing to disclose information to readers. For instance, after the first party ends, the narrator observes that “these ruminations of his no doubt confirmed his interest in her, but still, when he thought of her, he could not help admiring how superbly inaccessible she was in comparison” (Tyler, 156). There are two “her” here. Since the second her is italicized while the first is not, the narrator tempts readers to think that these two “her” refer to two different women. From the context, readers may arrive at the conclusion that the second her refers to Fujitsubo. In contrast, in Seidensticker’s translation, the narrator discloses Genji’s secret thoughts to readers without any suspension: Genji “thought too of Fujitsubo’s pavilion, and how much more mysterious and inaccessible it was, indeed how uniquely so.”