Canonizing Arthur Waley, rewriting Murasaki Shikibu: The Japanese back-translations of Waley’s The Tale of Genji

Leo Tak-hung Chan and Jindan Ni
Guangxi University | RMIT University

This article examines the two Japanese back-translations of Arthur Waley’s English rendition (1925–1933) of Murasaki Shikibu’s 源氏物語 Genji monogatari ‘The tale of Genji’ to underscore the complexities of back-translation as process and product. The back-translations by Samata Hideki (2008–2009), and Mariya Marie and Moriyama Megumi (2017–2019) are clearly attempts to reinvigorate the millennium-old Japanese tale and renew interest among the domestic readership, but they also serve to canonize Waley’s version. It is important that these two back-translations be read against a long history of successful translations of the novel — both intralingual and interlingual — to see the peculiarities of the new textual interventions. Unlike what usually happens with translations in general, the back-translators engage with two source texts (by Shikibu and by Waley) instead of one. Through close textual analysis, this study aims to demonstrate how back-translations can be an ideal site for exploring issues related to rewriting, canonization, retranslation, and textual authority in historical and cultural contexts.

Publication history

Date received: 15 October 2023

Date accepted: 30 May 2025

Published online: 30 June 2025

Table of contents

There are perhaps two reasons for the current paucity of research on literary back-translation, otherwise known as reverse or backward translation. First, back-translation is usually applied as a pedagogical tool or a methodology for ascertaining the accuracy of a translated text. It is widely used for non-literary translations, especially in the legal and technical fields, to ensure the accuracy and validity of translations for practical use. Second, the existing materials for the study of back-translation are rare, as the necessity to translate a translation back into the source language cannot be easily justified, especially for literary works. There is some research done by Chinese, Hungarian, and Turkish scholars focusing on so-called ‘cultural back-translations’, that is, the translations of culture-specific items in literary texts (e.g., Sun 2014; Wüthrich 2022). In this context, Klaudy and Heltai (2020) presents the most detailed analysis of how strategies of domestication and foreignization can work in relation to back-translating. However, ‘cultural back-translation’ pertains specifically to scattered items in a translated text but not to the whole text. Many researchers working in this mode choose to focus on lexical items that have been transliterated by writers of postcolonial literature from their native languages into English. This differs significantly from the phenomenon scrutinized in the present article: the two Japanese back-translations of Arthur Waley’s English rendition (1925–1933) of the Japanese classic 源氏物語 Genji monogatari ‘The tale of Genji’ (hereafter Genji) by Murasaki Shikibu (c.973–c.1014 or 1025).

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