A small ad in Private Eye seeks a companion 'sexy, feminine and discrete'. Siamese twins, I suppose, need not bother to apply. It is harder to divine why this translation of Murasaki's Diary renders one passage by the words: 'This is not to say that her women are always so genteel; if they forget themselves they can come out with the most indiscrete verses.' Perhaps, in becoming conversant with Japanese to a degree he makes plain even to me who know not a syllable of the language, Richard Bowring has forfeited some command of English. That looks all the likelier when he skids into bad grammar: ' ... sent to whomever was to copy out the story'. Or perhaps both the 'indiscrete' and the 'whomever' are misprints. If so, there is something moving in the persistence - and the persistent justification - of literary fears. It is roughly a thousand years since the son-in-law of the Emperor of Japan filched a copy of Murasaki's novel from her room at court and she recorded in her Diary the quintessential literary dread that it might be an inaccurate copy that 'would hurt my reputation'.

LRB 6 October 1983 | PDF Download