THE LANGUAGE OF GENJI

The words in The Tale of Genji are probably close to those spoken at the court ten centuries ago. The text consists of expository narration, direct speech, silent thought (interior monologue), occasional comments by the narrator, and poems, all in a harmonious style that accommodates variations of tone and mood, according to context and character. When two high-ranking gentlemen discuss a delicate subject, their language conveys the tension between them, and when scholars speak, their jargon resembles a local dialect.

The style of the tale is indisputably a great literary achievement, but it is also very difficult. Names are rare, and verbs seldom have a stated subject. After eight hundred years of Genji scholarship, it is still possible to argue that this or that speech or action should be attributed to someone else. Moreover, the vocabulary is relatively restricted and the available patterns of subordination relatively few. Neither the resources of the language itself nor the requirements of discretion encourage clarity of expression, and one feels sometimes as though the author is pressing against the received constraints of her medium. Still, the original was undoubtedly clearer then than it is now, and much of its famous elusiveness may be due to later readers' ignorance of reference, idiom, and telling turn of phrase.

Three linguistic features of the original deserve special comment. These are its evenness of flow, the integral role played in it by grammatical devices that indicate the speaker's social standing with respect to the person addressed or discussed, and certain modal inflections of the verbs in the narration.

The original has (with local exceptions) a lovely, smooth flow that cannot be conveyed in English, which resists such unstressed evenness word by word and sentence by sentence. However, one can still preserve the length of some of the tale's many long sentences and at least follow the original in avoiding blunt statement that might snag the reader's attention on a solid mental object. For example, the original will say that "Genji decided to act on his long-standing desire" rather than that "Genji finally decided to become a monk," and it will have a father "wish to see his daughter advantageously settled" rather than have him eager to find her a good husband. (The text has no stable term for either "marriage" or "husband.")

Polite and humble language may be the first issue mentioned when someone Japanese wonders how the tale can be translated into English at all. The modern Japanese language still makes it difficult to talk to or about someone without defining one's standing vis-à-vis that person, and other languages require similar linguistic acknowledgment of social relationship; but not so contemporary English, which offers relatively few means to achieve it. Appropriate diction and choice of vocabulary can make up the difference a little, and so can added interjections like "my lord" or "my lady," but an English translation cannot help sounding relatively informal.

Certain verbal inflections in Genji and other literature of its time have become an issue in recent years. The chief of these is -keri, which seems to indicate a verbal mode (rather than tense) that brings the events narrated into the present. Some scholars, for whom this quality of presence or immediacy is crucial to the sociopolitical significance of women's literature including Genji, hold that to translate such literature into the English past tense is to remove it from its audience in time and so to denature it completely. However, English lacks such a verbal mode of narrative immediacy, and translating into the present would not help, since the present is still a tense, not a mode, and is in any case difficult to sustain successfully throughout a long narration. In English, as in other related languages, a tale is normally told mainly in the past, and as a matter of naive reading experience it is untrue that events told in this tense lose their immediacy for the reader or listener. The basic tense of narration in this translation is therefore the past. However, most passages of interior monologue are in the first-person present.