II. G. V. Lipin. Translation problems: focus on Japanese

С.Я. Маршак

А.К. Толстой

А.Фет

И.Козлов

И.Козлов

Byron

Hebrew Melodies

Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star!

Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,

That show’st the darkness thou canst not dispel,

How like art thou to joy remember’d well!

So gleams the past, the light of other days,

Which shines, but warms not with its powerless

rays;

A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,

Distinct, but distant – clear, but oh, how cold![13]

К звезде. В бессонную ночь (Из Байрона) /1823/

Звезда, приветный свет тоски моей!

Уныло ты горишь во тьме ночей,

И трепетно в такой дали мерцаешь!

Ты мрак один лишь умножаешь. -

Всё призраков ночь страшная полна!

С бывалою ты радостью сходна;

Так прежних дней и благ воспоминанье,

Как томное твоё, звезда, сиянье,

Обманчивою отрадою манит,

Волнует дух, а сердце не живит.

Так и звезда во тьме чуть пламенеет,

Горит в дали, блистает, - но не греет.[14]

* * *

Бессонного солнца, в тумане луна!

Горишь ты далеко, грустна и бледна.

При тусклом мерцанье мрак ночи страшней,

Как в памяти радость утраченных дней,

Минувшее блещет меж горестных туч,

Но сердце не греет томительный луч;

И радость былая как ночью луна,

Видна - но далеко, ярка - но холодна.[15]

* * *

О Солнце, глаз бессонных! Звёздный луч,

Как слёзно ты дрожишь меж дальних туч…

Сопутник мглы, блестящий страж ночной,

Как по былом тоска схожа с тобой…

Так светит нам блаженство давних лет,

Горит, а всё не греет этот свет;

Подруга дум воздушная видна,

Но далека - ясна, но холодна.[16]

* * *

Не спящих солнце! Грустная звезда!

Как слёзно луч мерцает твой всегда!

Как темнота при нём ещё темней!

Как он похож на радость прежних дней!

Так светит прошлое нам в жизненной ночи,

Но уж не греют нас бессильные лучи;

Звезда минувшего так в горе мне видна;

Видна, но далека - светла, но холодна![17]

* * *

Солнце бессонных

Бессонных солнце - скорбная звезда,

Твой влажный луч доходит к нам сюда,

При нем темнее кажется нам ночь.

Ты - память счастья, что умчалась прочь.

Еще дрожит былого смутный свет,

Еще мерцает, но тепла в нем нет.

Полночный луч, ты в небе одинок,

Чист, но безжизнен, ясен, но далек!..[18]

II.1. TRANSLATION IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION

Very little has been published in literature about translation studies and globalisation. The latter has become a highly disputable issue today: it is generally used in a political and business context, but we suggest a different perspective. In our globalised world, translation is the key to understanding and learning foreign cultures.

The English language is usually associated with globalisation, however other languages have also benefited from this process. Literatures of other cultures and languages have found a wider audience. The most conspicuous example of this process is the destiny of Haruli Murakami’s novels now known worldwide. This is the aspect that has not been thoroughly discussed in the field of translation studies. In a modern global context we can bring more and more foreign elements into a target text, and thus keep more of the source text in the translation, i.e., create a target text that is less “foreign" for the source culture. The more elements of the source culture are preserved in the target text, the more authentic the transference of meaning becomes. I would like to illustrate this changes in translation practice and possible ways of solving translation dilemma. For example, the noun that represents Japan's untranslatable worldview is "kokusaijin," literally meaning "an international person," but referring exclusively to Japanese open-mindedness. "Cosmopolitan," the usual English equivalent, is hardly acceptable in this case. A Japanese "kokusaijin" has different cultural connotations, referring as well to an ordinary person with a flexible and open personality. This difference should be taken into account while translating from/into Japanese.

Another important language phenomenon should be considered by the translator. As it is known, Japanese people are fascinated with loanwords, and the number of such words continues to increase. Such words as "shakai" (society), "kojin" (individual), "kindai" (modern), "bi" (beauty), "ren'ai" (romantic love), "sonzai" (existence), "shizen" (nature), "kenri" (rights), "jiyu" (freedom), and "kare/kanojo" (he/she) were borrowed from European languages. Also substantially common are pseudo-loanwords of foreign origin (mostly English) created by Japanese speakers with meanings different from the original. For example, naitaa, a neologism, is formed from the English word "night" followed by the suffix "-er," and it means a night baseball game. Many English words used in Japanese gave altered their original meanings, and many are entirely homemade. For example, the term kuuraa (cooler) refers not to a drink or a food carrier but to an air conditioner, a substantial change in meaning takes place. The term saabisu (service), also made in Japan, is used to refer to the custom of giving small gifts and discounts to regular customers. The amount of English incorporated into the Japanese language in recent years is quite impressive.

Today in the current trend of globalisation, the translator has no need to find a translation of a term in the target language if this would make the target-language text lose credibility. This type of translation I suggest to term unassimilated translation. Cultures are getting closer and closer and this is something that I believe translators need to take into account. This phenomenon is currently under discussion among theoreticians. As Lawrence Venuti noted, the process of domestication of the foreign text is one of the task of the translator: “Translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target language reader. This difference can never be entirely removed, of course, but it necessarily suffers a reduction and exclusion of possibilities—and an exorbitant gain of other possibilities specific to the translating language."[19]

However, the translator cannot capture in one word every nuance of meaning that a word in the source language has. The best that the translator can hope to do is to capture those meanings and connotations that appear most relevant in the given context. To do this, the translator would appear to have three basic strategies at his disposal: 'borrowing' a word or sense-segment from Japanese, offering a Japanese item together with an extra definition (either within the body of the text of in a footnote), or representing the item entirely in terms rooted in the domestic culture. Thus the translator may resort to:

1) Borrowing. The most predictable examples are kimono, geisha, sushi, tatami, sake, manga, etc.

2) Borrowing plus footnote isanother strategy to use a Japanese word together with an explanatory footnote. For example, the use of Japanese realia “samurai” may be followed by a footnote (footnote: The samurai were traditional warriors, vassals of a feudal lord), or the realia of “ronin” by a footnote (The ronin were faithful samurai who avenged the death of their lord), Several strategies can be employed simultaneously. The example of tatami embraces several strategies: borrowing a Japanese word, using italicisation to signal foreignness, adding the defining word matting to the text, and providing a footnote offering further elaboration.

3) Definition within text

Footnotes are more typical of academic writing than of a novel. In novels it is not just semantic correspondence that matters, and the reader is likely to become irritated if constantly forced to consult footnotes. Earnest-August Gutt argues that a translation "should be expressed in such a manner that it yields the intended interpretation without putting the audience to unnecessary processing effort."[20] Who does read Japanese literature in translation could not but share this view. Another option is to offer a definition within the text. This may involve using a foreign word together with defining text.

4) Japanese term plus definition.

The translator may choose to introduce a Japanese term but add some defining text, as in the earlier examples. Earnest-August Gutt introduces a concept of "optimal relevance", explaining that the translator must focus on those features of the object that are most relevant to his readers, and avoid unnecessary details, because an attempt to convey each and every sense of an item as experienced by a native reader may destroy other relevant features of the original text. For example, a Japanese person's understanding of the term “ Obon” will include not only the knowledge that it is a festival held in honour of the dead, but also knowledge of when it is held, how and where it is usually spent, it's atmosphere, etc.

In Haruki Murakami’s novel “A Wild Sheep Chase”a reference to Hokkaido the translator accompanies by the additional information, implicit for the Japanese reader, that Hokkaido is an island, while when referring to Haneda Airport the translator adds the information that this is in Tokyo: “Mekurameppou ni Hokkaidou o urotsukimawaru yori wa madamashi dakara ne”[21]. In translation:“Anything is an improvement over scouring the entire island of Hokkaido totally blind[22].”

However this might be considered a controversial translation strategy. Clearly, in making explicit what the original author consciously chose not to say, the translator deviates from the source text.

5) Definition without Japanese term: "deculturalisation" in translation

The translator may avoid any direct reference to a Japanese cultural word used in the original text, choosing instead to offer definitions composed only of words rooted in the domestic culture He/she may substitute, for example, the word zabuton by cushions, by its functional equivalent. However, there are several connotations, both descriptive and functional, that cannot be conveyed by the word cushion alone: that a zabuton is usually larger, flatter, and firmer than the typical western cushion, that it is specifically intended for use in a tatami room, in which chairs are not normally used, and so on. Peter Newmark[23] describes this strategy as "deculturalising a cultural word" and Lawrence Venuti emphasizes this aspect: "the goal of communication can be achieved only when the foreign text is no longer inscrutably foreign, but made comprehensible in a distinctly domestic form."[24]

Cultures are getting closer and closer, and what brings cultures together is, certainly, translation. In essence, the translator strives to bridge the cultural gap between readers and the foreign text that lies beyond their reach. When the original text throws up objects and concepts that have no obvious counterpart in domestic readers' experience, the translator must ask the question: "Which meanings and connotations are most relevant to the target reader, and how can they be conveyed in language?"

II.2. INSIDE TRANSLATOR’S LAB: TRANSLATING “THE TALE OF GENJI”

“The Tale of Genji”, written by the Japanese authoress Murasaki Shikibu in the 11th century, is generally regarded as the earliest “true” novel in any culture, and as the greatest masterpiece of Japanese literature. The first translation into Modern Japanese was published by the great woman of letters Yosano Akiko in 1913. Into foreign language it was made by Arthur Waley in 1925-1932, who who established the tale's reputation in English. Into Ukrainian this work has not been translated yet.

Inventive as it is Waley’s translation is, however, considered inaccurate. After Edward Seidensticker’s translation of the tale in 1976 a new era in Genji studies in English bagan. The third and challenging translation that Professor Royall Tyler began in 1993 appeared not long ago. To have a closer look at the advantages of this translation and the problems that were solved it is necessary to address the translator’s laboratory. In his lecture at Australian National University (2003) Professor Royall Tyler unveiled the most crucial challenges he had to face as a translator of this classical text.

The translator outlines his strategy emphasizing the necessity to liberalize translation, but not at the expense of “faithfulness”. His main principle, which he formulates with reference to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is the search for “tuning fork”. In his introduction to his translation of Beowulf, Seamus Heaney wrote: “It is one thing to find lexical meanings for the words...but it is quite another thing to find the tuning fork that will give you the note and pitch for the overall music of the work. Without some melody sensed or promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the translator's right-of-way into and through a text”.

What follows is an abridged paper, presented by Professor Royall Tyler in 2003, to what we added a block of assignments to discuss the translator’s strategy.

Royall Tyler. Translating “The Tale of Genji”

(Fragments of a lecture presented by Professor Tyler at the Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University, on 10 October, 2003)

“[…] I had in mind before I began a certain conception of what I wanted to achieve - an idea of what the people in the tale were like and of what sort of English they would speak. It was an English almost beyond my reach, the one spoken by my grandparents and the people I had known around them when I was young. I followed no literary model because I doubted my ability to imitate one and get away with it. Even so, the language I listened for in my memory often eluded me, and I know that what I wrote often fails to match my conception. Still, without that conception I would have been lost. It is as Seamus Heaney wrote in his introduction to his translation of Beowulf, “It is one thing to find lexical meanings for the words...but it is quite another thing to find the tuning fork that will give you the note and pitch for the overall music of the work. Without some melody sensed or promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the translator's right-of-way into and through a text.” That was my experience, too. […]The most recent translator of the tale into modern Japanese, a novelist and Buddhist nun named Setouchi Jakuchiwho published her work in 1997, pitched to the widest possible audience. She made it perfectly clear and unambiguous, so that anyone could enjoy it on a packed commuter train or bus. That was not my goal, although I have nothing against brisk sales, because it seemed so much at variance with the character of the original. The original readers of Genji were in no hurry, and they appreciated a rich, copious work that required them to come forward, as it were, to meet it halfway, in a process of fully engaged listening or reading. I therefore hoped to draw the modern reader into something like that kind of active engagement. Among other things, I translated long sentences into long sentences, and I preserved the discretion and decorum of the narration.

Discretion and decorum have to do, first, with the way the narrator refers to her characters. She names no one in the course of eleven hundred pages except three minor, relatively low-ranking men, because she speaks from within the social world inhabited by the characters themselves and so must treat them, as her characters themselves do, with a respect that forbids the use of personal names. Instead, she uses their official titles, which change over time; or, if they have none, she designates them according to where they live, from a neighborhood in the city down to a part of a house. Although true to life in the author's world, this practice makes it difficult to discuss her characters at all, and so Japanese readers settled centuries ago on nicknames for the most important of them. An example is Aoi, the name readers give to Genji's first wife. In the text Aoi has no name whatever, being known at best as the daughter of the Minister of the Left. I followed the narrator's practice in this respect because I wanted first to preserve her fictional identity as a gentlewoman recounting actual events to her mistress and, second, to convey the acute consciousness of hierarchy shared by everyone in the tale. To bring it off at all I had to be able to remind the reader now and again, by means of a footnote or other supporting material, who such-and-such a character is. The character Murasaki, from whom the author received her nickname, illustrates why the attempt was worthwhile. She is the great love of the hero's life, but during most of their years together she is in his shadow - the more so because her birth, compared to his, is relatively low. However, near the end of her life she rises in stature, and a telling sign of her rise is that the narrator more and more often calls her openly Murasaki no Ue, or "Lady Murasaki.'' The effect would have been lost if I had called her "Murasaki'' from the beginning, when the text does not. Of course, for most readers that effect will be only subliminal, but that does not matter. My translation is full of intentional touches that I do not expect anyone to notice.

The other kind of discretion I meant has to do with preferring indirection to bluntness. The characters seldom call a spade a spade, and moreover their notion of "spade'' is very broad. Although the issue of marriage is prominent in the tale, the narrative has no stable word or locution for "marriage'' or even for "husband.'' Another recurring preoccupation for some of the characters is the wish to leave the world and become a monk or a nun. Nonetheless, the narrator avoids words like "monk'' and "nun,'' or even expressions such as "leave the world'' or "take holy orders.'' The reader soon comes to know that Genji himself has such thoughts, but all he ever mentions is a wish to act on his "long-standing desire'' (hoi). Previous translators into various languages, including modern Japanese, have not hesitated to identify this "spade'' unequivocally - Yosano Akiko even had one of the main characters wish to "enter upon a life of faith'' - but it seemed to me that I might strike a false note by doing so.

I will discuss two more aspects of my translation before I move on to say a little about the connection between literary translation and academic research. The first has to do with the way I treated interior monologue, and the second has to do with poetry. A feature of Japanese grammar, especially in this earlier period of the language, is that it offers only direct, not indirect speech. It is not possible to say, "He said he would go.'' One can only say, "He said, `I will go'.'' A passage reporting the gist of what someone said therefore looks as though it is repeating the speaker's precise words. A reader familiar with indirect speech, as the tale's original audience was not, easily gathers most of the time that the words reported are unlikely to be those originally spoken, or certainly not all of them; but the exclusive use of direct speech certainly gives the narrative freshness and immediacy. Imagine, then, the effect of reporting a character's silent thoughts in exactly the same way, as unvoiced speech.

Murasaki Shikibu seems to have been the first Japanese writer to exploit interior monologue fully as a narrative technique. When it appears, one suddenly finds oneself listening directly to a character's thoughts, as in the following example from chapter 49. A young man whose great love has died nurses his sorrow, even as his politically advantageous but otherwise unwelcome marriage approaches. The text shifts from third-person narration to first person interior monologue and back again.

At heart he knew he would never forget a loss he still felt keenly, and he

simply could not understand why, when they had clearly been meant for each other, they had nonetheless remained strangers to the end. Oh, how I could love someone whose looks recalled hers a little, even if she were unworthy in rank! If only I might see her again, just once, at least in the incense smoke of that old story! He was in no hurry to consummate this exalted alliance.

It is almost as though he sang a brief, first-person aria. However, first-person musing like this is unusual in English, and previous translators therefore rendered it in the more common third person, as in "He said to himself that...,'' "It seemed to him that...,'' "He reflected that...,'' and so on. I cannot blame them, since I too started out that way. However, when I understood the importance of the first person, I adopted it completely and refined my use of it even as the author refined hers. As a result, the passage that continues the one I just read really does sound like recitative followed by aria. This time the sufferer is a young woman who has just learned that her husband, a prince, is about to take a second wife, as custom permits and as his politically powerful future father-in-law requires.

[Recitative] His Excellency of the Right hastened to inform His Highness that the event [the new marriage] would take place in the eighth month, and she who inhabited His Highness's wing at Nijф cried to herself when she heard the news:

[Aria] Oh, I knew this would happen! How could it not? What had the miserable likes of me to expect, ever since this began, but mockery and humiliation? I had always heard what a scoundrel he was, and no, I never trusted him, but in person I never saw in him anything strikingly offensive, and he made me such heartfelt promises! How am I ever to know peace again, now that he has suddenly changed?

And so on. Her silent speech, including several brief shifts back to third-person narration toward the end, is 322 words long in my translation. It could hardly appeal more immediately to the reader.

Poetry was integral to Japanese court life eight to ten centuries ago, and so it

is integral also to the fiction of the time, in the form of the thirty-one syllable tanka. Japanese poetry does not rely on rhyme, which the nature of the language would make too easy to be interesting; nor does it rely on quantity, which the nature of the language would render impossible. Instead, it is characterized by a variety of sophisticated linguistic devices that I need not explain today, and by syllable count. A tanka consists of five sub-units (not lines) of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables each. Good manners required every member of the nobility to compose such poems at suitable junctures, and every young lord or lady was brought up so as to be able to do so, although naturally not every effort was a great success. There are 795 poems in The Tale of Genji. It is difficult to overstate their importance, readers over the centuries having often valued them above the prose. In fact, for hundreds of years the tale was seen by many as above all a manual of poetic composition. Readers like that are rare today, in Japan or elsewhere, if indeed they exist at all, but the poems certainly command the translator's care and respect. Alas, I doubted when I began my work that I could convey their effect successfully in English. I also assumed that many readers would object to being interrupted time after time by baffling little clumps of what claimed to be verse. I therefore made my poems as discreet as possible and stuck to the method I had adopted until about two third of the way through, when I had to concede that even I could no longer stand what I was doing. I saw that I would have to retranslate all the poems. But how? I decided to try following the Japanese syllable count in English, as some other translators have done in other contexts. After rejecting the five little lines that are so common in translations of this kind, I finally settled on two lines, centered: the first of five-seven-five syllables and the second of seven-seven. Success took time and practice, but eventually I came to feel reasonably confident that things had gone well. As an example, I will cite a passage from chapter 10 ("Sakaki,'' which I translate as "The Green Branch.'') It is a simple sequence of three poems voiced by three different people, in a spirit of mourning for the late emperor, Genji's father.

Snow was blowing on a stiff wind, and by the time Genji arrived the late emperor's residence was all but deserted. Genji began to speak of the past. His Highness [one of Genji's brothers] observed that the five-needled pine before the empress's rooms was weighed down by snow and that its lower branches had died. He said, "Alas, that great pine whose broad shade inspired such trust seems to live no more, for the year's last days are here, and the lower needles fall.''

The poem was no masterpiece, but it caught their feelings so well that Genji's tears moistened his sleeves. Seeing the lake frozen from shore to shore, Genji added, "That face I once saw, clear in the spotless mirror of this frozen lake, I shall never see again, and I am filled with sorrow.'' His artless words merely gave voice to his heart. The empress's gentlewoman offered, "The year soon will end, the spring there among the rocks is caught fast in ice, and the forms we knew so well vanish from before our eyes.'' Nothing about these poems is especially striking, although they express genuine feeling. Their motifs are entirely conventional. However, they convey nicely at once a major social use of poetry and the advantage of translating this poetry into a consistent form faithful to the original.

I will to turn now to two small, prose examples in order to illustrate the way I sometimes felt obliged to take a strong (rather than a euphemistic or equivocal) position on what the text actually means. It is at spots like these that the distinction between translation and research begins visibly to blur. The first, from chapter 2 ("Hahakigi,'' "The Broom Tree''), is scandalously famous. Genji, then only sixteen, is in an amorously enterprising mood when chance leads him to spend a night at a retainer's house. The young mistress of the house is no further away than the other side of an unlocked sliding door, and her husband is off in the provinces. That night Genji steals through the door, locates her by the dim glow of an oil lamp, and, after a flood of sweet talk, picks her up and carries her into another, pitch-dark room. She resists him fiercely from the start (in words, tone of voice, and so on) not because she finds him repellant - far from it - but because the social gulf between them is too great and because she insists nonetheless on her own dignity. Her rejection genuinely upsets Genji, who finally sees her point; but then he just redoubles his eloquence. The text continues,

He gravely tried every approach, but his very peerlessness only stiffened her resistance, and she remained obdurate, resolved that no risk of seeming cold and cruel should discourage her from refusing to respond. Although pliant by nature, she had called up such strength of character that she resembled the supple bamboo, which does not break. Her genuine horror and revulsion at his willfulness shocked him, and her tears touched him. It pained him to be the culprit, but he knew that he would have been sorry not to have seen her. And there is the puzzle, literally translated: "He would have been sorry not to have seen her.'' What does this sentence mean? Has he or has he not done what no reader can fail to have in mind?

Early commentaries either say nothing or deny everything. In the late eighteenth century a great scholar acknowledged that the inevitable had happened, but some after him continued to prefer denial or silence. Among English translators Arthur Waley wrote, "He would not gladly have missed that sight,'' while Edward Seidensticker left it at "would not for the world have missed the experience.'' But what experience? At an early stage of my work, I read the passage over and over again, grasping blindly for something I knew I was missing. Then, suddenly, I got it, and I caught my breath at the narrative's unexpected frankness. In the language of the tale, a man who "sees'' (miru) a woman is living with her in a relationship founded on sexual intimacy. Intercourse itself is seldom the issue, but in this instance the pitch-dark room and the fact that the two have only just met leave no other possibility. Genji cannot have "seen'' her in the dark. Therefore I wrote, "He knew that he would have been sorry not to have had her.'' Such is the force of the expression. This episode remains controversial to this day, in an age when many Japanese as well as American students, and even some professors, condemn Genji as a rapist. (This is not an attitude I have met in Australia, but my experience of teaching the work here is very limited.) A few years ago, an American colleague therefore set out to rehabilitate him, arguing in an article that he is not a rapist because in this instance he never actually passes to the act or that, in others, the woman involved has not really withheld her consent. The colleague in question therefore denied that the expression I just mentioned means what it means. Alas, if the only way to prove that Genji is not a rapist is to prove that he never has intercourse with a woman without her consent, then his cause is lost. Fortunately, however, the issue for the author and her narrator is elsewhere. In fact, a correct reading of the original gives the whole affair new immediacy and actually lends the woman in question new strength and depth as a character.

My second example of a translation problem comes from chapter 53 ("Tenarai,'' or "Writing Practice''), the next to last in the tale. Unlike the one I just discussed it is neither famous nor infamous, and any rendition of it would have done. However, the passage - the key part of it is only a few words long - was critical to my reading of the character concerned, and I wanted very much to get it right, if possible. This character, a young woman known as Ukifune (in the original she has no name at all), has been through an experience so strange that few general readers - as distinguished from specialists, especially recent ones - seem even to understand what it is. An evil spirit picked her up bodily and carried her off to a place where, eventually, some monks found her. A nun then undertook to look after her. However, she remained unconscious, in a sort of trance, for over two months, until exorcism returned her more or less to herself, in state of semi-amnesia. In the passage in question, she receives a great fright. In the middle of the night another occupant of the room where she is sleeping, an old nun, sits up and demands to know what she is doing there. Ukifune thinks she is a demon. In my translation she reacts as follows.

Now she is going to eat me! the young woman thought. That time when the spirit made off with me I was unconscious - it was so much easier! What am I to do? She felt trapped. I came back to life in that shocking guise, I became human, and now those awful things that happened are tormenting me again! Bewilderment, terror - oh yes, I have feelings! And if I had died I would now be surrounded by beings more terrifying still!

The issue is what she means by the expressions I rendered as "shocking guise'' and "I became human,'' and especially what she means by the slippery sentence I translated, "Bewilderment, terror - oh yes, I have feelings!'' The issue is her mental condition. Almost all readers believe that, far from having been abducted by a spirit, she threw herself into the nearby river in order to drown herself and was then washed downstream to the place where she was found. They also believe that, having recovered from her ordeal, she is now completely well and in the process of gaining, heroically, her full independence from the detestable world that had driven her to contemplate so desperate an act. What I gather from her story, however, is that she is still unstable and in fact insane. Exorcism certainly loosened the spirit's grip on her, but the narrative makes it clear, at least to me, that the spirit never completely her. Read in this light, her talk of "shocking guise'' evokes not an embarrassingly undignified state of dress and so on (the usual interpretation), but a state of spirit possession; while "I became human'' suggests less "I returned to my senses,'' than, "From being possessed by a non-human power, I returned to the condition of a human being.'' Finally, her exclamation, "Bewilderment, terror - oh yes, I have feelings!'' is especially intriguing. The original sentence is almost unintelligible except in the context of other, related passages. It suggests that, even after the exorcism, Ukifune remains almost without human affect, as though she were caught in a sort of waking trance. The fright I described then shocks her briefly into a normal tate of awareness, so that she can now say, almost in surprise, "Bewilderment, terror - oh yes, I have feelings!'' Overall, my reading of Ukifune makes of this popular heroine something utterly different from what readers have been imagining for centuries. It is not possible to prove definitively that I am right, but I doubt that anyone can definitely prove me wrong, and my reading may therefore have value as a contribution to scholarship on the work. Certainly, it is a critical to a new interpretation of the entire Tale of Genji, one that I have set forth in a series of articles published over the last four years. No, literary translation is by no means mindless work. That is worth saying in many countries these days […]

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