[Acquired: Thursday, May 9, 2013]:
The Tale of the Heike. Trans. Royall Tyler. Viking Penguin. London: Penguin, 2012.
Tyler, Royall, trans. Before Heike and After: Hōgen, Heiji, Jōkyūki. 2012. Lexington, KY: An Arthur Nettleton Book, 2013.
I can't count how many times I've picked it up and tried to read it, always in vain. For someone who's a rabid fan of the Tale of Genji and who's therefore read more than his fair share of medieval Japanese literature in translation, the Heike Monogatari looks like a dead cert. But it always seemed so dead on the page: so lacking in visual as well as narrative appeal - in the earlier translations I tried, at any rate:
The second of the two pictured above is actually an extremely accurate rendition of the original - or so Royall Tyler told me. I met him, you see. It was at a translation conference in Melbourne in July 2011, while he was putting the finishing touches on this book.
He gave a fascinating paper on the performance tradition associated with the Heike, which is still - just - continuing in modern Japan. I couldn't resist complimenting him on it afterwards, and taking the opportunity to ask him a few things about his earlier translation of the Tale of Genji.
When I mentioned that I had two copies of his version - one (hardback) at home, the other (paperback) in the office for quick reference - I think he realised that he was dealing with a bona fide fan (or do I mean monomaniac?). The colleague he was with, Meredith McKinney, herself the author of a lovely version of Sei Shōnagon's classic Pillow Book, was even more impressed when she heard that I'd tracked down a copy of Ivan Morris's complete, two-volume translation of Sei Shōnagon, rather than being content with the abridged Penguin edition.
It was quite a weird encounter, actually. I don't think they could understand somebody who was so evidently enthusiastic about Japanese literature, and yet had not felt inspired to plunge into immediate study of the language itself. I can see their point. It doesn't really make sense to me either. The fact remains, though, that just as in the case of the classic Chinese novels, these English translations exist, and continue to proliferate, and I get so much pleasure from reading and comparing them and imagining what their distant originals must be like ...
Anyway, whether that makes sense or not, that's the way it is, and the main thing I got from our talk was a strong disposition to check out Tyler's "opera libretto" arrangement of the Heike text as soon as it became available, in the hopes of finally getting to the end of it.
As an added bonus, though, it's nice to see that he's also issued a companion volume of translations of the various chronicles which supplement and complete the Heike story:
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- category - Japanese Literature: Prose: Classical
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