Translating Women

Prefacing Gender: Framing Sei Shônagon for a Western Audience, 1875–2006

PrefaCing genDer: framing sei shônagon for a WesTern auDienCe, 1875–2006 Valerie Henitiuk, University of East Anglia The most recent English-language translator of the text that concerns us here takes the fact of female authorship to be inseparable from any understanding and appreciation of its content. Meredith McKinney’s introduction to the 2006 Penguin version opens as follows: A thousand years ago … a lady at the imperial court of Japan settled herself in front of a precious bundle of paper and began to write the extraordinary work later called Makura no sôshi, known to English readers as The Pillow Book. In it she wrote about her world, in a voice so vividly alive that we find ourselves in the presence of a woman we recognize as we would a friend. (2006: ix) Gender is central to McKinney’s project, which implicitly aims to redress what she sees as a prior tendency, intentional or otherwise, to misrepresent not only the women’s world at the heart of Japan’s Heian court, but also the lively voice of one who is arguably its single most personable author. While scrupulously avoiding any direct criticism of her predecessors,1 McKinney does identify a significant difference of tone that she has sought to carry across, asserting that in the original text Sei Shônagon actually meets the reader: face to face across the centuries, assuming your familiarity with her and her world, compelling you to nod and smile. She is talking to you, with the full force of her imposing and engaging personality. (2006: 57–58) 240 Valerie Henitiuk That an early 21st -century woman translator would want to highlight a strong, attractive female presence in world literary history should come as no surprise, but looking back through what is now well over a century of Western readings of the Pillow Book, it becomes evident that gender has been a prime focus in virtually all previous versions as well. While earlier translators may not have so self-consciously underscored authorial sex, as does McKinney, and certainly did not always mark it as an unproblematically positive feature, a close examination of how they viewed their task makes it clear that their understanding of the writer and her text has been thoroughly gendered. Because mediation of a given text for its target-language readership cannot help but significantly impact communication, an analysis of the translator’s explicit and implicit attitudes as expressed in prefaces, introductions and notes usefully reveals how readers have been led to understand and respond to the author known as Sei Shônagon2 over the almost 150 years since she was first “discovered” by the West. More particularly, such paratextual materials provide evidence of the central role gender continues to play in the framing of a woman writer by her (predominantly male) translators. Discussion of Sei Shônagon’s sexuality, competitiveness with both men and women at the imperial court, and even physical appearance constitutes an important part of these prefatory remarks. Another common theme with real implications for how the author’s work is transmitted and received is the degree to which art is or is not involved in her deliberately informal genre of zuihitsu (literally “following the brush,” or “miscellany”). In this article, I explore how awareness of and engagement with gender, particularly as evidenced by translators’ prefaces, has been and remains closely bound up with the reception of this masterpiece by Western audiences. Japan’s longstanding isolationist policies meant that its artistic production did not come to light abroad until the mid-19th century. Europeans, suddenly confronted with previously unknown artistic riches, were taken aback by one “remarkable fact” in particular: namely, “that a very large proportion of the best writings of the best age of Japanese literature was the work of women” (Aston 1875: 122). The Pillow Book, the earliest specimen of what would become the quintessentially Japanese genre of zuihitsu, is among the first works from the cultural zenith known as the Heian period (8th through 12th centuries) Prefacing Gender 241 to attract the attention of Western scholars and translators. Sei Shônagon enjoyed a unique vantage point from which to report on life at the court, its customs, festivals and intrigues, for which later generations have cause to be grateful—some have gone so far as to suggest that hers is “the most important document of the period that we possess” (Waley 1929...