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Michael Emmerich The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature . Michael Emmerich. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pp. viii+494.

2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/678497

1545-6951

Doris G. Bargen,

Japanese History and Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeMichael Emmerich The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature. Michael Emmerich. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pp. viii+494.Doris G. BargenDoris G. BargenUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is a fabulously stimulating scholarly work. It is not a serious flaw that one must switch the order of title and subtitle in order to get an accurate impression of what Michael Emmerich’s book is all about. It is not about Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji monogatari (ca. 1010) itself so much as its “replacements: translations…that literally take the place of Genji monogatari, texts that are read instead of the (unknown and unknowable) original” (11). Emmerich does not analyze Murasaki Shikibu’s work in the nearly five hundred pages he has produced. His work is, instead, a highly sophisticated study of some of the most influential productions in word and image that have sprung from the Genji. It is also a history of the Genji’s national and transnational transmission, a representation of The Tale of Genji as “a product of translation, global circulation, and mass-media discourse” (2).Emmerich takes the millennial celebration in 2008 of Murasaki Shikibu’s monumental literary creation as a stepping-stone for his two-pronged inquiry. In part 1, he presents Ryūtei Tanehiko’s Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (1829–42), temporarily banned for its stylish and erotic displays, as a replacement of the Genji. In part 2, titled somewhat belatedly “In Medias Res” (viii, 227), he tracks down the overlapping cross-cultural paths of Genji translations into English and modern Japanese. Both parts are enriched by theoretical assessments of the literary canon and of what is required to make a work into a national and international classic.Emmerich’s study, especially part 1, “Ninety-Nine Years in the Life of an Image,” is richly illustrated, and its 115 figures, largely woodblock prints, are fully identified in the captions. One looks in vain, however, for a list of illustrations. Such an omission is regrettable, as is the absence of a bibliography.And yet, Emmerich’s study has several unconventional features that compensate for these lacunae. They reflect his scholarly interest in book production, whether it be in Tanehiko’s Inaka Genji or in the layout and design of his own study. Concerning the latter, the opening page of each new section is printed on differently patterned “wallpaper” in faint gray—perhaps meant to be reminiscent of Heian calligraphy and painting typically applied to an ornamental background. Some readers may be slightly irritated by having to squint in order to read Emmerich’s printed words superimposed on Japanese texts, crests, or other patterns, but such creatively designed opening pages certainly succeed in arresting the eye and calling attention to themselves as textured text. In addition, this palimpsest effect catches the readers’ attention with an eye-opening insert showing either an epigraph or a suggestively allusive photograph that signals the theme of the chapter ahead.In his introduction, Emmerich implicitly assumes his readers’ familiarity with Genji monogatari. Since there is no holograph of the Genji, knowledge of Murasaki Shikibu’s major work is based on manuscript copies from later times. For most readers, such manuscripts and early printed versions would have been unaffordable, and their classical language would have been inaccessible. Any kind of reading was, because of Japan’s persistent manuscript culture, done in “transcription” almost from the beginning, and for most Japanese and non-Japanese readers today, mostly in translation. This elusiveness of the Genji text is compounded by another form of distancing from the nonextant original, and that is the cultural divide between Heian courtly culture and modern culture.It is precisely the peculiar creative energy released by such forms of distancing that launch Emmerich’s investigation into the transmitted Genji text’s great variety of incarnations and transformations. His preferred term for these new Genji avatars is “replacements” (11). He forcefully rejects the commonly used term “reception,” which refers to the ways that readers have responded to and commented on the Genji, although it is apparent that the scholarly term “reception” also applies to creative replacements that reflect the reception of the eleventh-century work long after the time of its re-creation. According to Emmerich’s conceptualization, Genji replacements need not be “in kind” at all; they can be anything, resembling the Genji in neither form nor content, as long as consumers recognize the product as a Genji replacement. He provides examples ranging from the trivial to the sublime. There are The Palm-Size Tale of Genji of 1837, the ¥2,000 banknote issued in 2000, and the November 1, 2008, Millennial Anniversary Memorial Ceremony designed to commemorate Murasaki Shikibu and refresh the “canonization” (14) of this world classic. Emmerich focuses on two major “replacements.” The first is Tanehiko’s Inaka Genji in its various editions between 1829 and 1928. His second category of replacements, encompassing the early translations of the Genji into foreign languages and modern Japanese, reminds us that Genji monogatari was not always regarded as a world classic.Murasaki Shikibu certainly needed craftsmen to provide her with precious paper and utensils, and artists were engaged sooner or later to illustrate her Genji. Similarly, Tanehiko’s Inaka Genji was an extremely complex example of gōkan, “literally ‘combined booklets’” (31), easily available and affordable for the general public. Tanehiko collaborated with the woodblock print artist Utagawa Kunisada (Utagawa Toyokuni III, 1786–1865). Just as Emmerich provides relatively little analysis of Murasaki’s Genji, except for certain episodes that emerge in Tanehiko’s gōkan, so we find little overall contextualizing information about Inaka Genji. For the latter, Andrew Markus’s seminal study (The Willow in Autumn: Ryūhei Tanehiko, 1783–1842 [Cambridge, MA: Council of East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992]) will be more useful than Emmerich’s rather brief summary of the kabukiesque plot (88). Critical of Markus’s approach to Tanehiko, Emmerich takes a different path, emphasizing the metafictional consciousness informing the production, reader consumption, and reception of the Tanehiko-Kunisada collaboration on a Genji replacement of major importance. Refuting the assumption that the nonelite townspeople who constituted the readership for gōkan had nonmediated knowledge of the Genji, Emmerich posits instead that they read Inaka Genji as “a visually and textually sophisticated, thrillingly hybrid, beautifully printed, stylish book whose success has little to do with Genji monogatari, but over time comes to be subjugated…to an image of the classic as ‘the original’ that Inaka Genji itself had created” (35). He is emboldened to assert that “for a majority of Inaka Genji’s early modern readers, Genji monogatari almost certainly existed, insofar as it existed at all, as a reflection of Inaka Genji, not the other way around” (51). While he finds it humorous that many readers, including the novelist and Genji translator Enchi Fumiko when she was a child, “labored under the impression that Inaka Genji was Genji monogatari” (55), he acknowledges that Tanehiko borrowed many passages of Murasaki’s Genji almost verbatim (97).Emmerich is to be applauded not only for explicating the genre of gōkan for his readers but also for allowing them vicariously to savor its intricate defining elements in all their sensual splendor: the quality and thickness of the paper, the binding techniques, the stylish shades of ink, the innovative interactive flow of text and image across pages, all of which make the gōkan an enormously exciting artistic vehicle with overall reader-friendly packaging and eye-catching details. The gōkan’s capacity to raise awareness of the “bookishness of the book” (118, 136) may have inspired Emmerich to title his first chapter “A Gōkan Is a Gōkan Is a Gōkan,” an obvious reference to Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (“Sacred Emily” [1913], in Geography and Plays [New York: Something Else, 1922], 178). Just as Stein’s famously puzzling sentence asserts the identity of a thing while at the same time calling it into question by multiple evocations, so Emmerich traces the evolution of the gōkan’s glamorous properties to the dull vanishing point, where the prominence of the woodblock images is sacrificed and a picture-oriented publication becomes mostly text. Regrettably, after 1882, the readers’ delight in a most sophisticated fusion of text and image was diminished by the advent of new printing technologies and the “yomihonization of the gōkan” (37) in “movable-type editions” (191) of Western format. This diminution of the readers’ multimedia experience was followed by the “novelization” (219) of Inaka Genji after 1918.If Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji was all but lost in its Inaka Genji replacement, it was rediscovered through translation on the national and the international stages. Emmerich cites critics like David Damrosch, who defines world literature as “writing that gains in translation” (What Is World Literature? [Princeton University Press, 2003], 281), and he himself sees the Genji as “a work of world literature…that survives almost exclusively in its replacement, and as a work that is discursively figured as participating in world literature through its replacements” (235–36). Emmerich explains Meiji-period foreigners’ often startling misconceptions of Murasaki Shikibu’s work as their ignorance of the text, and he elaborates on the proliferation, dissemination, and correction of these errors. Much of this early fascination with Murasaki Shikibu focused on her iconic image embodying “female authorship” (255) rather than on the text.The first translation into English was by Suematsu Kenchō (in 1882). Although Suematsu’s translation was only partial and in antiquated English, it was, according to Emmerich, more “widely read” (239) and influential than is generally assumed. Sent to England to study historiography, Suematsu gave readers and reviewers of his translation the sense that “there is no better history…than her story” (273). In 1925, Virginia Woolf started promoting the first volume of Arthur Waley’s six-volume Genji in translation. Oddly, with this English translation the Genji was “reborn into world literature, [while] in Japan, Genji monogatari was hardly even a national classic” (291). Emmerich gives a detailed reception history of the Genji in translation and its effect on the increasingly interwoven critical Genji discourse in Japan and abroad. The Genji boom in Japan started in 1890 with less expensive and more readable editions that allowed readers to see the Genji as literature, as “something more than a repository of facts” (308). It inspired “over ninety partial or complete modern-Japanese translations” (10), most famously those of Yosano Akiko, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Enchi Fumiko, and Setouchi Jakuchō.Emmerich presents Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962) as a peculiar cultural mediator of Genji discourse. This scholar wrote with remarkable frankness about how he first detested the Genji but then came to envision it as a world classic that Japanese readers might find “more interesting when read in an English translation” (325). In 1929 he coincidentally heard about Waley in three widely separated places—on a train to Milan, in New York, and in Geneva—but did not obtain a copy until 1933, when he learned from a foreigner at the Imperial Hotel Tokyo that he could buy one in the hotel bookshop. Waley’s Genji led to Hakuchō’s passionate advocacy of the tale, to the point of suggesting a “back-translation” (328), for “the original may be concise, but its sentences are like chickens with their heads chopped off, decapitated bodies tottering unsteadily this way and that” (Masamune Hakuchō, “Eiyaku Genji monogatari,” in Masamune Hakuchō Zenshū, 30 vols. [Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten, 1983–86], 23:468; trans. Emmerich, 330). Such a “back-translation” of Waley’s Genji actually appeared in 2008 with the first volume of Samata Hideki’s Ueirī-ban Genji monogatari (331). Are there back-translations of other linguistically, intellectually, or culturally “inaccessible” world classics? The practice of back-translation implies that, in order to render a difficult classic into its modern version, it must first become readable in a foreign language. It also raises in my mind the related question of why authors like Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov chose to write in languages other than their own. Did they, like translators, want to build bridges among languages and cultures?In his conclusion, Emmerich pontificates about the rapidly evolving discourse on translation studies. Here his prose reads like a lecture and seems misplaced in an otherwise admirably stimulating scholarly work. The book is highly recommended to those who want to learn about Genji “replacements” and canonization rather than the Genji itself. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 3February 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/678497 Views: 951Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.