Thoughts on Waley’s Genji
Welcome to the new blog for faculty and students in BU’s program in Literary Translation, a place to share observations about the art of translation that come up in the process of translating or writing about translation.
I thought I would kick things off by sharing a few thoughts about one of my favorite translations, the great Arthur Waley’s rendering into English of the world’s first novel, the eleventh-century Tale of Genji. Waley’s Genji is turning one hundred this year. Three additional English translations have come out over the decades since Waley completed his version, but for many readers, Waley’s is still the most beautiful. One measure of this is that the “Waley Genji,” as it is known in Japan, has, astoundingly, been translated back into Japanese not once but twice.
I called the Genji “the world’s first novel.” If we defined a “novel,” with E. M. Forster, as “any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words,” (1) the Genji more than qualifies at more than half-a-million words. And yet Lady Murasaki’s Tale is also much more than a novel insofar as it contains hundreds of 31-syllable waka poems that the characters write to each other and themselves. I teach the Genji every fall, and my students and I have created a digital repository of different translations of all 795 poems that appear in the Tale. This has given me the opportunity to read and think closely about Waley’s Genji poems for many years now. But just a few days ago, it occurred to me that I had never thought much about how Waley uses English meter and stress in his translations of the poems. Japanese prosody is based on syllable count, and Japanese poems do not use stress in the way English does. Perhaps because of this, most English translators have focused more on syllables than stress in producing their translations of the poems. Also, Waley does not use line breaks or indentation in his translations of the poems. Instead, he just flows them in with the prose. This means that his poems don’t really “look like poems.” They are even rather hard to find on the page. And yet, once you find them and read them out loud, they sound very much like poems. Many of them are truly lovely.
As I thought about how to describe this sense I have that Waley’s poems sound like poems (even if they don’t look like poems on the page), I decided to look more closely, to see how they scan. I’ve just started to look, but so far I have found that many of Waley’s poems use identifiable patterns of stress in ways that enhance their overall effect.
A beautiful example is the the second poem in Chapter Twelve, which Genji’s mother-in-law Princess Ōmiya recites to Genji just before he leaves the capital to go into exile in far-away Suma. You can see the original Japanese and other translations of this this poem on our repository here. (Just be sure to use a browser rather than your phone. We are still working on the mobile version!) In the poem, the princess implores Genji not to forget her daughter, Genji’s wife Aoi, who died tragically a few chapters earlier. To appreciate the poem, it helps to know that it draws on a trope commonly used in poems of mourning: the idea that ordinary clouds in the sky remind a person who has lost a loved one of the smoke that rose from their funeral pyre. For the recently bereaved, the world is colored by grief.
Here’s the princess’s poem to Genji, in Waley’s translation:
“Seek not another sky, but if you love her, stay beneath these clouds with which her soul is blent.”
Appearing in a single line on the page, the poem looks like an ordinary prose sentence. But it has the rhythm of a series of iambs, the metrical “foot” consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, like this:
Seek not | a no– | ther sky | but if | you love | her stay
Be neath | these clouds | with which | her soul | is blent
Broken into two lines like this, the first turns out to consist of six iambic feet (iambic hexameter). Since five feet (iambic pentameter) is the most familiar poetic line in English, this first “line” (if it were lineated in this way…) feels held over just slightly, with the extra foot causing the reader to pause on the word “STAY.” Then the poem opens up again, as the remaining syllables resolve into a standard line of iambic pentameter. As a whole, the iambic meter creates a forward momentum in the first hexameter line, while the pause on “STAY” and subsequent resolution into pentameter in the second lends conviction and authority to the princess’s admonition to Genji to “seek not another sky.”
In Chapter Five, Genji sends a poem to a very young Murasaki, telling her how frustrated he is that he cannot visit her more often. Here’s how Waley translates it:
“Since first I heard the voice of the young crane, my boat shows a strange tendency to stick among the reeds!”
This poem opens with a regular iambic pulse, but then the meter breaks down in the middle section with two stressed syllables in a row (“my boat shows a strange ten-den-cy to stick“) before it smooths out again at the end with “among the REEDS.”
What’s remarkable is that this metrical “sticking” in the middle section mirrors the poem’s content. Genji’s complaint about the boat’s stubborn refusal to move, the thing keeping him from seeing Murasaki (represented in the poem by the young crane), finds its formal equivalent as the poem itself becomes tangled and obstructed by those two stressed syllables.
In embedding the poems within the prose narrative without formal lineation, Waley was making a deliberate choice. Inconspicuously merged with the surrounding prose, his poems do not announce themselves as formally crafted objects. Yet on closer examination, they turn out to use rhythm and stress in ways that serve the narrative and emotional purposes of the tale. Waley’s choice not to lineate means that the reader cannot rely on visual cues that what they are reading is a poem. Instead, readers learn to listen for the sound of poetry in and among the prose. This produces an effect that is quite close to Murasaki Shikibu’s prosometric writing in Japanese, where the boundary between poetry and prose is more porous than it tends to be in English. Her poems are written as single lines that look like prose, while the prose itself tends to fall into the syllabic pattern most familiar in Japanese poetry of five syllables alternating with seven. As readers approach the text on the lookout for poems “hidden” in the prose, they begin to expect that almost any sentence could be a poem.
Waley also drew on the resources of English literature in his translation. Mariya Marie and Moriyama Megumi, two sisters who have most recently translated Waley’s Genji back into Japanese, have identified a striking example of this in the second poem to appear in the tale. Here is it in Waley’s translation:
“At the sound of the wind that binds the cold dew on the moor, my heart goes out to the tender lilac stems.”
Genji’s father, the Kiritsubo Emperor, sends this poem to his mother-in-law, Genji’s grandmother, after the death of Genji’s mother at the opening of the tale. The poem expresses the Emperor’s concern for his young son, who has lost his mother, even as the Emperor has lost his wife. In the original Japanese, the plant referenced, ko-hagi, is the bush clover. Other translators have translated it that way or left the word in Japanese as “hagi,” a plant that blooms in autumn, when the scene in the narrative takes place. But Waley translates it as “tender lilac stems,” a plant that blooms in the spring.
This is a significant departure from the original. So what happened? Did Waley simply get the name of the plant wrong? The sisters don’t think so.They have made the intriguing suggestion that Waley’s choice to render bush clover as “tender lilac stems” was a deliberate nod to his good friend T.S. Eliot, with whom Waley, in the late nineteen-teens, had met for dinner and discussion of poetry every Monday.(1) In 1922 Eliot had published “The Waste Land,” a poem that famously opens with lilacs:
“April is the cruellest month
breeding lilacs out of the dead land…”
Pointing out that these lines appear at the very beginning of “The Waste Land,” just as the Emperor’s poem appears at the beginning of the Genji, Moriyama and Mariya write that “the lilac thus became a poetic image that graces the openings of two modernist masterpieces: Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and Waley’s Genji.” (2) I would just add that, like Genji’s father’s poem, “The Waste Land” was written in the wake of death. For Genji’s father, it was the death of his beloved wife. For Eliot it was the death of countless soldiers in the first World War, and more specifically his close friend Jean Verdenal, who died on the battlefield “mixed with the mud of Gallipoli” and whom Eliot remembered fondly “coming across the Luxembourg gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac.” (3)
These are just a few examples of how Waley wove the resources of English prosody and English modernist poetry into the fabric of his translation. In so doing, he created a text that works on multiple levels simultaneously. The translation becomes a palimpsest, with layers of meaning drawn from classical Japanese poetics, from the long tradition of English prosody, and from the literary world Waley himself inhabited.
- E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1927. 16.
- Waley commented about his dinners with Eliot, which also included Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford: “It was purely social and friendly. Poetry and the technique of poetry were talked about a great deal. But it was very unpretentious. It was the nicest thing of that kind I’ve ever been associated with.” See “Arthur Waley in Conversation: BBC Interview with Roy Fuller (1963)” in Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley. Edited by Ivan Morris. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972. 138-151. 140.
- Mariya Marie and Moriyama Megumi, Redi Murasaki no tī pāti: Rasen’yaku Genji monogatari. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2024. 24-25.
- Matthew Hollis, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. New York: Norton, 2022. 4.
Thanks to friends and colleagues Dawn Lawson, Peter Schwartz, and Will Waters for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on this piece.