Word: waley
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Genji is a sensitive aristocrat who pursues beauty in a world he knows more readily offers sadness. With the news from Europe full of Nazi advances, Keene writes, "I turned to it as a refuge from all I hated in the world around me." The translation was by Arthur Waley, a British polyglot who was also a famed translator of classical Chinese literature. Keene eventually befriended him, and years later traveled from Japan to comfort Waley in London after learning that Waley's longtime partner, the dancer Beryl de Zoete, was dying. The description of that sad meeting...
...characters, as if we were reading a modern psychological novel, and yet these same people use a language (and belong to a culture) that is inaccessible to native speakers today. There are at least six translations into modern Japanese, as well as two notable previous renderings (by Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker) into English. Royall Tyler's new translation (Viking; 1,174 pages) is a genuine labor of love, and makes a special virtue of attending to a certain ceremonial indirectness in the way the characters address one another. The great temptation for a translator is to say the unsaid...