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Searching out an old letter
Michael Dirda's recent essay on Sei Shōnagon's Pillow book (specifically, the new-ish translation for Penguin by Meredith McKinney) is a fine 101 on the book, complete with balanced appraisal of its treatment in English so far and even suggested European reading along the same lnes. One passage that caught my eye was this comparison of McKinney's style with that of Ivan Morris, previous Penguin translator and go-to Heianographer:
[... A]mong "Things that make you feel nostalgic," McKinney includes this item: "On a rainy day when time hangs heavy, searching out an old letter that touched you deeply at the time you received it." But here is Morris: "It is a rainy day and one is feeling bored. To pass the time, one starts looking through some old papers. And then one comes across the letters of a man one used to love." The McKinney version is doubtless accurate in its succinctness and may even reflect a slightly different original text, but Morris's words catch us by the heart.
I'm not sure which text McKinney used — both Penguin Classics and ANU's Asian Studies department have woefully inadequate web presences — but Morris says that his work is "based primarily on the Shunshō shōhon [春曙抄本] version as edited by Kaneko Motoomi [金子元臣] in 1927 and on the Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei edition of the Sankanbon 三巻本 ["three-scroll manuscript"] version edited by Ikeda Kikan [池田亀鑑] and Ikigami Shinji [岸上慎二] in 1953." According to Wikipedia, the Shunshō shōhon was edited by Edo scholar Kitamura Kigin 北村季吟 and based on the Nōin 能因 manuscript.
Let's take a look at a few versions of the original from three-scroll- and Nōin-based manuscripts, then:
1. また、をりからあはれなりし人の文、雨などふりつれづれなる日、さがし出でたる。
2. また折からあはれなりし人の文、雨などの降りて徒然なる日さがし出でたる。
3. あはれなりし人のふみ。雨なとふりて。つれ／＼なる日さがし出たる。
"1" is from Ikeda Kikan's version for Iwanami, based on the "three-scroll" manuscript. (I have it in bunko form.) "2" is from the University of Virginia's e-text of the Nōin manuscript. And "3" is transcribed from Kyushu University's online scan of an Edo-period published version of the Nōin text.
Both content and form are similar in all three. The main differences are use of kanji, and the missing mata + worikara ("and" + "at the time") at the start of KU's version, which could be scribal error. I suspect that this passage is much the same in all manuscripts, and in particular I doubt that any has it chopped up into sentences the way Morris's translation is. (Note that Edo usage of "。" doesn't correspond to a full-stop "。" today. Think of it as a general "pause" character.)
A painfully strict translation retaining clause order would go something like this:
[And] when a letter from a person that moved one's heart [at the time] is, on a rainy, idle day, searched out.
The succinctness of Meredith's version does, as Dirda suspects, hug the outline of the original more closely. Morris's technique of dividing one polyclausal Heian sentence into several simple English ones makes his version more cinematic and immediate, but does not convey to the reader the texture of Heian literature, the long and twisting chains of thought finally tied off by a verb in the form reserved for ending statements.
The other trade-off is that the assumptions Morris makes to set the scene are not always justified by the source. Here, Morris's image of someone hit by a wave of forgotten emotions when they stumble across an old love letter is certainly more moving than the idea of someone searching out the letter because they want a fix of those emotions to pass the time. But the fact remains that the verb sagasu means "search for" or "search out", and never (as far as I can tell) "come across [by chance]." Maybe Kigin disagreed.
In closing, just because this information should be Googlable, here is McKinney's treatment of the famous first line:
In spring, the dawn — when the slowly paling mountain rim is tinged with red, and wisps of faintly crimson-purple cloud float in the sky.
Marxy:
I swear that Roy Andrew Miller has this thing in one of his books where he basically says, "Anyone who really thinks Sei Shoganon actually existed is an idiot." What's up with that?