Nearly a thousand years ago, in the city now called Kyoto, a very young woman received a magnificent gift: a complete copy of The Tale of Genji. She shut herself up in her room to read it day and night, happier (as she wrote later) than any empress.

In the twentieth century a Japanese critic and essayist reflected on her example. He had read all the great Japanese classics, but Genji was just too difficult, and he wondered in frustration how on earth she had done it. Reading the original, he wrote, was like peering through thick fog. He never actually enjoyed Genji until he read Arthur Waley's pioneering English translation on a trip through the Suez Canal. Of course, he remarked, it was less a translation proper than an exotic romance inspired by the original work; but it was an extremely attractive one and much easier to read.

Such is the difficulty of the original Genji, although someone like me now has superb modern editions, punctuated and annotated in accordance with eight hundred years of scholarship, to help make an accurate translation possible after all. There is still plenty of room, though, for choice and interpretation. Every word, every sentence offers a range of possibilities among which I had to thread a path, guided by my own conception of the text. That is why this is a new Genji.

I began translating with a certain idea of style and tone, a certain notion of distinction and grace, based on my knowledge of the tale and its world, and on my own experience of the English language. What I had in mind amounted inevitably to an approach quite different from that taken by Edward Seidensticker in his 1976 translation. The original is famous for its long, flowing sentences, and I wanted to write that way too. My choice of words, I promised myself, would never cheapen or belittle the characters, whom I would bring to life as fully and sympathetically as the text allowed. That also meant conveying the exquisitely erotic flavor of certain scenes, especially in the early chapters; seeing to it that comedy in the original should be equally enjoyable as comedy in English; and ensuring that passages heartrending in the original should bring tears to the English reader's eyes as well.

The original is remarkable for its use of inner speech: passages that take the reader inside the head of a character by transcribing the character's silent thoughts. This technique seems largely to have been devised by the author herself, and it can be strikingly vivid. However, it is not particularly familiar in English, and previous translations have turned these thoughts into the third person past ("She thought that she preferred not to..."). I started out doing the same thing, but I soon shifted to first person present (" 'I would rather not,' she thought"), which yields an effect much closer to that of the original. In my translation these passages therefore have an especially fresh immediacy.

For an English reader the tale is also unusual in that it includes nearly 800 poems. These are an essential element of the text, one that many readers over the centuries have valued even above the prose. However, they are extremely difficult to translate effectively, and at the start I never imagined that I had the ability to do so. I did not want to betray the poetry, of course, but in practice my main concern was simply to make sure that reader should not trip over every poem the way someone walking along a path might trip over a rock. My initial solution to the problem seemed adequate at the time, but near the end of the first complete draft the result became intolerable even to me, and I realized that I would have to retranslate all the poems into a new format. So I did. To my astonishment, I then found that many of these new poems lived and breathed in a way I had thought impossible. Far from posing an obstacle to the flow of the prose, they seemed to lift it to new heights. I now dare to hope that my translation is the first to convey simply and immediately some of the effect of the original poetry.

In the end it is for readers, not me, to judge the value of my translation. I know what I wanted to achieve, but they will see what I have actually done. Still, I believe that this is a new, more detailed and more fully engaging Genji than has yet been seen in a language outside Japanese.

Royall Tyler
October 11, 2001