The Tale of Genji

This new version by Dennis Washburn, a professor at Dartmouth, falls somewhere between Seidensticker's reader-friendly translation and Tyler's more stringently literal one, resulting in a fluid, elegant rendition.-- "Washington Post"
Murasaki watched the sexual maneuverings, the social plots, the marital politics, the swirl of slights and flatteries that went on around her, with the keen, sometimes sardonic, and always worldly eyes of a medieval Jane Austen.-- "The New Yorker"
Washburn's translation is a superb achievement. He fully captures the enthralling quality of the original, with its reliance on dialogue and interior monologues, and finely tunes the diction to the age, status and emotional state of the characters, as well as to the demands of the social situation...With exquisite irony, the narrative progressively reveals that the seductive myth of romance is quite empty at its core. Washburn's version brings this out powerfully.-- "Times Literary Supplement"
This is the Washburn Tale of Genji from start to finish: immensely scholarly but also, somehow, uncannily readable, helpful without being pedantic, clarifying without ever simplifying.... It's an amazingly cheering performance, a Genji to last a century.-- "Open Letters Monthly"
In Dennis Washburn's new translation of The Tale of Genji, lovers of novels will have the literary experience denied them until now: for hours and weeks at a time they will be able to sink into the dark, titillating, sexy, sad, enraging, absorbing world of this, the world's first novel, written by Murasaki Shikibu, the imaginative genius court woman of eleventh-century Japan. Washburn eliminates the gap in centuries between us and that long-lost world, and preserves for us the freshness of vision and voice of that great writer from long ago and her Proustian chronicling of the darkening beauty of a world in decline, a world depleted of male erotic power and female depredation, of the tortures of jealousy and the frailness of art and beauty to console.--Alan Tansman, University of California at Berkeley
Retranslations of a classic are always reason to celebrate. All the more so when it's the Genji, with all its complex characters and unforgettable episodes. One tries to begin logically, from the first page, but can't resist flipping ahead to locate favorite scenes and see how they are imagined anew. . . . A fresh and invaluable Tale of Genji for both those of us reuniting with a familiar friend and those encountering it for the very first time.--Valerie Henitiuk, editor-in-chief, Translation Studies, and author of Worlding Sei Shônagon: The Pillow Book in Translation
A formidable accomplishment. The language is beautiful, the footnotes are helpful yet unobtrusive: Washburn has performed a great service by making this groundbreaking novel, written in the eleventh century, available to the English-speaking world in a version worthy of the Japanese masterpiece.--Edith Grossman
Award-winning translator Dennis Washburn's lucid and accessible rendering will introduce new readers to the entrancing narrative world of this great classic.--David Lurie, Columbia University
Washburn's translation [of The Tale of Genji is] the most readable and the best for understanding the book at the plot level.--Motoko Rich "New York Times Book Review"