Free The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon by Sei Shōnagon Page B

fictional account of court life presented a view of the world as she wanted it to be, his account of tenth-century Japan has its own whiffof idealism. His emphasis on aestheticism as the dominant characteristic of the court reflects assumptions about art and literature that were invisible to him because of the age in which he lived and worked. The simple fact that he translated The Pillow Book as he did suggests that he shared, or at least was never bothered enough to question, his generation’s confidence in its cultural superiority and the universality of its standards of aesthetic tastes. He was apparently untroubled by the omissions in his translation, for in his view there was no point trying to read the original purely on its own terms.
    The elite world Waley inhabited was not simply one of rarefied scholarship. His literary connections, especially with the Bloomsbury Group, put him in contact with a circle of writers who were on the cutting edge of literary Modernism. These interactions undoubtedly reinforced his already strong propensity to privilege a belief in the priority of genius and the individual talent in the creation of art. However, in occupying these two worlds Waley had to reconcile the perceived divide between the work of the scholar and that of the poet in order to treat translation as a form of art that attempts not only to capture the parochial qualities of the original that make it worthy of translation, but also to conform to broad contemporary literary standards. There is no question that he succeeded in many respects in producing works of considerable aesthetic appeal, but in terms of engaging the parochial qualities of a work like The Pillow Book , his achievement is much more uneven. It may seem paradoxical, but to give Waley the credit he is due we have to acknowledge the limitations and flaws created by assumptions that flowed from a narrow view of mid-Heian court society. Thus, it is important to briefly reconsider the historical context of the composition of The Pillow Book and some of the key literary practices of the period it exemplifies.
    As Waley notes in his introduction, Sei Sh ō nagon was most likely born in the year 966. She was the daughter of Motosuke no Kiyohara, who worked as a provincial official, but became famous as a poet and scholar. Her family line can be traced back to the late seventh century, and it included many notable literary figures. We do not know her given name – like many other women authors from this period, we know her only by the name associated with her writings. Sei () is the Chinese-based pronunciation of the element kiyo in her family name (). Sh ō nagon () is a government post (Lesser Counselor), and it was common for women who served at the palace or in the households of the nobility to take their name from an official title held by a male relative (usually the father, but not always). The scant archival record makes it difficult to say anything definitive about her personal life, and like many women writers of this period Sh ō nagon’s identity is partially hidden behind the anonymity of her literary name.
    Motosuke seems to have desired a career at court for his daughter, partly as a means of promoting his family’s position, and so she was married to Tachibana Norimitsu when she was sixteen. She gave birth to a son and her husband’s career made a promising start, but he suffered a series of reversals and their marriage was on the point of annulment when Motosuke died in 990. In 993 she received her husband’s permission to separate in order to go into the service of Empress Teishi (Sadako), the oldest daughter of Fujiwara no Michitaka, who at that time held the powerful post of Kanpaku (Chancellor).
    Sh ō nagon went into service at the palace for two main reasons. First, the separation from Norimitsu and the death of her father left her in a precarious social position. Serving in the salon of Empress Teishi thus provided some degree of