The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon Read Free Page B

upon to create her art—the unusual forms and seemingly aleatory structure of The Pillow Book makes sense and should be engaged and enjoyed on its own terms. Of course the work is most celebrated in Japan for its great stylistic beauty; and since it is a miscellany, it is meant to be read in bits and pieces. On that basis, Waley was justified in taking the approach he did; he produced a work that is true to the original by treating it as a miscellany, and by capturing the beauty of its prose and the vitality of the narrative voice in English. Still, by not translating the entire work he distorts the view of tenth-century Japan as a culture wholly aesthetic and absorbed in the present. He claims, rightly, that works like The Pillow Book provide an insight into the values and customs of a society distant in time and place, but by not engaging Sei Sh ō nagon on her terms, by selecting what he likes, or what he thinks his readers will like, his translation is self-reflective, telling us as much about his aesthetics as it does about Sh ō nagon’s.
    Waley’s approach to translating was guided by tastes shaped for the most part by European literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus he read The Pillow Book as the product of a society interested in aesthetic rather than intellectual pursuits. Waley worked for the most part in isolation from Japanese scholars and writers, but the lack of direct connection with modern Japan did not seem to bother him much. Perhaps this was an outgrowth of his view that translation, in narrowly artistic terms, was a means for self-expression. After all, his fascination with Heian culture was of a piece with the Japonisme that had such a profound effect on European art during his lifetime. It was a kind of exoticism that further emphasized the universalized aesthetic superiority of the West over the particularized local cultures of the East. For readers of his generation the distortion produced by this particular emphasis was not an especially urgent problem. The notion that a translation could actually improve on the original was not uncommon, if the reception of the work of other important translators during the period is any indication. Assuming that the literary value of a translation may be judged on its own merits apart from the original, it follows that a translation may potentially be the superior work of art.
    The reputation of Waley as a translator remains high, but now the praise is more often qualified. His version of The Pillow Book may be criticized for being anachronistic, for playing too fast and loose with the original, for displaying a cavalier attitude toward historical accuracy; and it has long since been displaced as the standard English-language version by full-length translations by Ivan Morris and Meredith McKinney, both of which are sensitive, careful renderings. Yet despite the criticisms that may be made of his work, despite his limitations and flaws, Waley continues to be revered and his work still read, and deservedly so – not simply because of his historical importance or because he challenges the reader to think seriously about translation as an art form in and of itself, but because the beauty of his prose captures the artistic spirit of a brilliant and fascinating woman of Heian Japan.
    Dennis Washburn
Dartmouth College



































ANNOYING THINGS
    When one sends a poem or a kayeshi (“return-poem”) to someone and, after it has gone, thinks of some small alteration—perhaps only a couple of letters—that would have improved it.
    When one is doing a piece of needlework in a hurry, and thinking it is finished unthreads the needle, only to discover that the knot at the beginning has slipped and the whole thing come undone. It is also very annoying to find that one has sewn back to front.
    Once when her Majesty was staying at my Lord the Prime Minister’s house, * and she was with him in the western wing, to which he