When people ask me, “OK, you’ve had this podcast for three years … what is it about?”, I magically produce, out of thin air, this handy video:

Hey, poetry friends, why not give it a shot? J. Keith Vincent, the Boston University Professor who, with his students, has compiled this astounding database and anthology, would welcome you. Go to the website, read a few poems, compare the translations, and try posting a version. You don’t need to have read Genji, though you’ll probably want to eventually (I read the Arthur Waley version).

Suddenly, I have three in there. Join me!

See, I wrote Poetry for Dummies in 2000, and now my editors have me chained to a rock until I finish a revised edition. So I was writing a section about Genji, learned of genjipoems.org, and my head, as it does a lot, exploded. I got in touch with Professor Vincent, we hit it off, and he invited me to submit some translations. “I don’t know Japanese, so they’d be ‘versions’ rather than translations,” I said. “Totally legit,” he said. I tried three, he loved ‘em, he posted them, and now I can use them in Pottery for Dummkopfs! Here they are, with the context in the book:

So here is Book 2, Poem 2. The wife of a game warden for the emperor’s court is upbraiding her husband for his unfaithfulness. These poems are, by the way, like tanka:

Here is Book 3, Poem 1. Seventeen-year-old Genji, heir apparent, writes to a woman he would take for a lover. It’s one of the sublest, most delicate poems in the whole novel:

Dew on the wings of

A molted cicada shell

In the secrecy

Of a shady tree; secret,

My sleeves grow damp with my tears.

And here is a poem from Book 8. Genji has ravished the daughter of a woman who is his sworn enemy ... yet despite all this he and the young woman fall in love. He writes this to his beloved:

You love the beauty
of moon-set amid late-night
mists -- clearly I see
that our togetherness is
no mist, but strong, enduring.

I hold few fast assumptions about female and male, but one of the things I love about Tale of Genji is that the female novelist, Murasaki Shikibu, is very interested in creating characters who see one another and take what they see to heart. In spite of himself, Genji has fallen in love with a woman he basically raped (terrible), but, as he gets to know her, he discovers in her a delicacy and a love for beauty. That is what has conquered him and makes him think their togetherness, in spite of all that is against it, will endure.

Could be fun. Try your hand!