BD. Edmund Blunden

100. [Blunden]. ‘Japanese Classic’. Review of Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Arthur Waley (D26c). TLS, 8 August 1952, p. 513.

Blunden’s penchant for comparison between Japan and England is evident here in his assertion that ‘in Japanese literature [Genji] is in . . . a comparable position to that held by the Canterbury Tales in English poetry’. Murasaki Shikibu (Ap) is a ‘novelist of undying freshness in observation, treatment and expression’, and Waley’s translation, reissued in 1952, ‘stands as one of the principal heights in the view of Western re-creations of Eastern genius’.