She was of course of proper aristocratic birth, and seems to have been given by her father an unusually good education even by the fairly liberal standards that prevailed for women at the time. She apparently knew Classical Chinese as well as Japanese, and at court had to take some pains to hide that fact, lest she seem too masculine. From this we can infer an early interest in literature and a talent for language that make the achievement of her great novel seem somewhat more explicable, if no less stunning.
The Tale of Genji depicts the aristocratic life of Heian Japan—the setting is two or three generations before Lady Murasakfs own time—through the life of Prince Genji, every Heian lady's dream of what a courtier should be. He is a master of every art from painting and calligraphy to incense-blend- ing and origami; he can compose a stylish waka five-line poem as easily as he can breathe. He has an exquisite fashion sense;
his comportment is invariably elegant; his gifts to his ladyfriends are always in perfect taste. Interestingly he is not, at least from our point of view, very imposing physically; illus- trated-scroll editions of the novel produced not long after it was written show him as pale and slightly pudgy. Genji is not so much a perfect hero as a perfect aesthete. Much of the novel is devoted to his numerous love affairs. Affairs, more or less clandestine, were very much the norm for that society, but what truly distinguishes Genji as a lover is his kindness and thoughtfulness; he is never cruel, and he treats his ex-lovers with great kindness and courtesy. Rather shockingly from our point of view, his one great love is his young bride Murasaki, whom he adopted as a ward when she was a young child, raised to be a suitably elegant companion to a courtier like himself, and married when she came of age. And it is only toward Murasaki that he behaves unforgivably: When he supplants her in her role as principal wife by making a socially advantageous marriage with a princess, she dies of a broken heart.
The whole atmosphere of Genji is suffused with beauty and refinement, but also with a sense of sadness and impending loss, a feeling that beauty is ali the more beautiful for one's realization that it will soon fade. The sensibility of the novel, and the society it depicts, reflects the Buddhist conviction that the world we so crave is an illusion held together by desire. It gives us a glimpse of a rarefied and remote age; many readers find it hard, at first, to tune themselves to the pace and sensibility of the novel.
Murasaki wrote the Genji in installments, as a private enter- tainment for herself and her lady friends; one can imagine that the life of a court lady was often tedious, and the appearance of a fresh chapter of the tale of the Shining Prince would have been most welcome. One gets the sense also that Murasaki eventually grew tired of her novel, or at least of the obligation to keep producing new chapters of it. Violating ali of our notions of a well-wrought plot, Genji dies three-quarters of the way through the book, and one imagines that, like Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle many centuries later sending Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls, Murasaki decided to end her labors by killing off her hero. But like Sir Arthur, she wasnt allowed to get away with it; the novel resumes after Genjfs death with the life and loves of his son Kaoru, and with a deep- ening sense that the characters of the book have lived through a golden age that will never return again.
I know very well that when you pick up the Genji for the first time, it will seem like a dauntingly big book; when you begin to read it, it may strike you as slow-paced and exotic to the point of seeming alien. Nevertheless, persist. Like Prousfs Remembrance ofThings Past [105], this is a very big book that truly repays mul- tiple readings; at some point the strangeness will transform itself into wonder. The refinement and psychological acuity of Murasaki^ prose will draw you into a world of the imagination that is one of the world's great artistic achievements.
A word on translations: The version by Arthur Waley (pub- lished in 1925-33) was for many years one's only choice, and it still is a pleasure to read; it is a classic in its own right. Even so, I prefer the newer version by Edward Seidensticker (1976), which is as smooth and readable as Waley's (though perhaps lacking some of Waley's Bloomsbury literary panache), and is much truer to MurasakTs text. Waley allowed himself editorial liberties that seem slightly presumptuous in dealing with a masterpiece of the rank of The Tale of Genji, while Seidensticker trusts Murasaki to speak for herself.
J.S.M.
29
OMAR KHAYYAM
IO48-? The Rubaiyat
I remember being told some years ago by an Iranian friend how surprised he was to learn that Omar Khayyam is known in
the West entirely as a poet. He assured me that Ornar Khayyam is remembered throughout the Islamic world, and particularly in his homeland of Pйrsia (now Iran), as a great mathematician and astronomer. His verses, while esteemed, are seen as no more than any highly educated man of his time might have composed, and indeed was expected to be able to compose extemporaneously whenever the occasion arose. (The same talent was demanded of medieval Japanese courtiers; see Sei Shхnagon [27] and Murasaki Shikibu [28].) The story of how Omar Khayyam came to be a great poet in English is a fascinating one.
Start with the poetry itself. A rubai (plural rubaiyat) is a short poem, comprising a pair of couplets of which the first, second and fourth lines must rhyme. Most Western readers assume, for lack of any reason to the contrary, that "Rubaiyat" is the name of a long poem by Omar Khayyam; but the word itself could easily be translated as "Verses" or "Quatrains." The decision of Edward FitzGerald, who published his translation of the poem in 1859, to leave the title in Persian, can be seen as a deliberate choice emphasizing the "exotic" nature of the original work. Moreover, while hundreds of Omar Khayyam^ rubaiyat have survived, in traditional Persian collections they are simply a large body of short poems, with no overall narra- tive or discursive structure. FitzGerald^ great stroke of genius as a translator was to arrange Omar Khayyam^ verses to pro- duce a long, continuous poem, giving it an aesthetic and philo- sophical weight that was at best only implicit in the original scattered quatrains.
What we have, then, in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward FitzGerald (and retranslated a number of times since, sometimes more accurately but never more pleasingly) is a unique hybrid, a brilliant English poem created from Persian elements. It has evoked for generations of English readers a place that is perhaps more Persian than Pйrsia, an exotic land of wine and roses that existed more for poets than for ordinary folk. FitzGerald^ Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam (as opposed to the original collections of Omar Khayyam^ rubaiyat) is, in fact, a prime example of what the Palestinian critic Edward Said has denounced as "Orientalism," the use of art and literature to create an exotic, romantic, and (he claims) fundamentally false image of Asian cultures, substituting European fantasies for real lands where people live and die, prosper and suffer, like anyone else. Said's charge is true to an uncomfortable degree, but it is not the whole story. Complicating the issue is the fact that Persian poets like Omar Khayyam themselves used verse to evoke an exotic, perfumed, mystical realm of the imagination; that qual- ity is preserved, but not created, in translation.