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Edward Seidensticker, translator of the "Tale of Genji," 1921-2007
by Todd Doherty, Book Processing
Edward Seidensticker, a leading Japanese translator, essayist, and critic, passed away on 26 August 2007, at the age of 86. He had been in a coma since April, when he had suffered a head injury. Born in 1921, Seidensticker was a native of Castle Rock, Colorado. He earned his bachelors at the University of Colorado, and then studied Japanese at the Navy's Japanese Language School.
Seidensticker served in the Marines, and was in the Pacific theater during World War II. He first entered Japan in September of 1945 as a translator for U.S. occupation, and after his discharge he remained, using his translation and writing skills, working in the Foreign Service.
He later did some postgraduate work at Harvard, and then studied literature at Tokyo University. He held teaching posts at Sophia University in Tokyo, as well as at Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Michigan in the United States. Seidensticker retired in 1986, thereafter splitting his time between Tokyo and Honolulu.
Seidensticker has written or translated several books, most notably The Tale of Genji [Jp: Genji Monogatari] by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese court lady who lived during the Heian era. Seidensticker's translation was highly regarded for its accuracy.
The Genji, written by Murasaki in ca. AD 1000, is arguably the first true "novel". By comparison, in the western tradition the first structurally similar work would be Cervantes' Don Quixote, appearing six centuries later.
The Genji was virtually unheard of outside Japan until the 20th Century. Only two serious attempts at an English translation were made when Seidensticker undertook the effort. The first attempt in 1881 was not widely regarded. In 1926, Arthur Waley published his translation of the Genji, but the "Edwardian" style is antiquated to modern ears. Seidensticker studied the Genji for 15 years, finally publishing his translation of it in 1976. This is generally regarded as the authoritative translation for contemporary audiences.
Seidensticker's style was to stay as close to the work as he could, but to infuse it with a certain literary quality. He once said that "A literal translation cannot be a very literary translation."
Andrew Horvat, a Japanese language professor at Tokyo Keizai University and one of his contemporaries, said of his translations: "You could feel the emotions and the nuances that the original writer wanted to convey," and that "He did more to make Japanese people appear human to foreigners than all of Japan's public diplomacy combined."
While he translated in a literary style, Seidensticker himself had never fallen in love with the illusion of an exotic Far East city. In "Tokyo Central", he wrote that "Geisha, with their massive, unwashable heaps of black hair, were ugly, unclean creatures." To him, Mount Fuji was "an uninteresting pimple of a mountain."
Seidensticker was also known for his dry wit. Once he was asked about nationalistic author Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide. "I got on with him very well," Seidensticker said, "But he laughed too much. And when people laugh too much, you wonder whether anything amuses them." In 1992 someone asked him if he was worried about Japanese re-militarization. Seidensticker replied, "Look at the young people around you. Could anybody make soldiers of them?"
In more recent years, Seidensticker had written on the cultural history of Tokyo, penning "Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake" and "Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake", as well as his own memoir, "Tokyo Central".
Below is a list of related titles, available from YBP and Baker & Taylor. For your convenience, this list is also available in a MS Excel spreadsheet. click here
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