Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderLiterary fact

The Tale of Genji, written in Japan in the early 1000s by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, is often called the world's first novel. Its 54 chapters follow the life and loves of Genji, an emperor's son, and then the generation after him.

Kyoto, c. 1000–1012

LiteratureHistory

The story behind the card

Murasaki Shikibu is not her real name, which is unknown. She served Empress Shōshi in Heian-kyō, today's Kyoto, and wrote the tale between about 1000 and 1012, probably in instalments passed around among the women of the court. She wrote mostly in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic script, because Chinese, the language of government and prestige, was then considered men's business. Her own manuscript is lost; the tale survives in some 300 later copies that differ from one another, and the oldest illustrated scrolls date from the 12th century. Whether it is the “first” novel depends on the definition, since Greek and Roman prose stories are older, but its large cast, inner lives and characters who grow old give it much of what we expect of a novel. Arthur Waley's English translation of 1925 to 1933 made it famous in the West.

Türkçe oku
Genji'nin Hikâyesi çoğu zaman dünyanın ilk romanı sayılır. Eseri 1000'li yılların başında, Japon imparatorluk sarayında nedime olan Murasaki Shikibu yazdı. 54 bölümlük eser, bir imparatorun oğlu olan Genji'nin hayatını ve aşklarını, ardından da ondan sonraki kuşağı anlatır.
Kyoto, 1000–1012 dolayları

Murasaki Shikibu yazarın gerçek adı değildir; gerçek adı bilinmiyor. Bugünkü Kyoto olan Heian-kyō'da İmparatoriçe Shōshi'nin hizmetindeydi. Eseri yaklaşık 1000 ile 1012 arasında, büyük olasılıkla saraydaki kadınlar arasında elden ele dolaşan bölümler hâlinde yazdı. Metni çoğunlukla Japon hece alfabesi hiragana ile yazdı; çünkü devletin ve saygın edebiyatın dili olan Çince o dönemde erkeklere ait bir uğraş sayılıyordu. Yazarın kendi el yazması günümüze ulaşmadı; eser, birbirinden farklı 300 kadar sonraki kopya sayesinde bilinir. En eski resimli tomarlar ise 12. yüzyıldan kalmadır. “İlk roman” olup olmadığı, romanın nasıl tanımlandığına bağlıdır; Yunan ve Roma dönemine ait düzyazı öyküler daha eskidir. Yine de kalabalık kişi kadrosu, karakterlerin iç dünyası ve yıllar içinde yaşlanan kahramanları, eseri bugün romandan beklediklerimize çok yaklaştırır. Arthur Waley'nin 1925-1933 arasında yaptığı İngilizce çeviri eseri Batı'da ünlü yaptı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: The Tale of Genji
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Much of ancient Greek philosophy and science reached us through Byzantine scribes, who kept copying the old texts by hand in Constantinople for more than a thousand years. Before and after the city fell in 1453, Greek scholars carried many of these manuscripts to Italy.

Parchment and papyrus decay, so an ancient text survived only if someone kept making fresh copies. In the 9th and 10th centuries Byzantine scribes adopted a smaller, joined-up handwriting called minuscule and recopied the classics in it. Few of the older manuscripts were kept, so for many ancient authors the oldest surviving copy dates from this period. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, summarised 279 books he had read; almost half are now lost, so for many of them his notes are our main record. His pupil Arethas, later archbishop of Caesarea, today's Kayseri, had manuscripts copied that preserve works by Plato and Marcus Aurelius; his Plato is now in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The 10th-century Suda, an encyclopaedia of some 30,000 entries, also quotes many lost sources. This revival of learning is known as the Macedonian Renaissance, after the ruling dynasty.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree three times: in hieroglyphs, in Demotic, an everyday Egyptian script, and in ancient Greek. Scholars could still read Greek, so they could compare it with the Egyptian versions line by line. In 1822 the French scholar Jean-François Champollion used it to crack the hieroglyphic script.

Hieroglyphs had been unreadable for more than 1,400 years: the last known inscription was carved in AD 394, and later scholars wrongly assumed that every sign stood for an idea. The breakthrough came through names. Royal names are written inside oval frames called cartouches, and from 1814 the English scientist Thomas Young matched the cartouche on the stone with the Greek name Ptolemy and worked out some of its sounds. Champollion knew Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, still used in the Coptic Church. In September 1822, in a letter to the secretary of the French Academy of Inscriptions, he announced that many hieroglyphs stood for sounds, and by 1824 he had shown that the script combines signs for sounds with signs for meanings. Over the following decades, texts from more than 3,000 years of Egyptian history became readable again.

British MuseumRead card
WonderLiterature

Shakespeare's plays are the earliest known written source for many English words and phrases, from “star-crossed” to “green-eyed monster”. But being first found in Shakespeare is not the same as being invented by him, and many such words turn out to have been used by others first.

The popular figure of about 1,700 words invented by Shakespeare rests largely on the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first edition cited him as the earliest user of many words. The scholar Jonathan Hope has pointed out why: the Victorian readers who collected quotations for the dictionary read Shakespeare more thoroughly than any other writer, so he often got the credit for words that can also be found in others. Later research, helped by searchable collections of early printed books, has found older examples of many of them. What remains is still remarkable. He turned nouns into verbs, added prefixes and suffixes freely and joined words in new ways, and dozens of his phrases, such as “salad days” and “sea change”, are still in everyday use more than four hundred years later.

Literary historyRead card
WonderLiterature

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, when she was 18, after a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley by Lake Geneva. The novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.

That summer is remembered as the Year Without a Summer: the huge eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before had cooled the world, and cold rain kept the friends indoors at the Villa Diodati, which Byron had rented. After an evening of reading German ghost stories, Byron proposed that each of them write one. Mary struggled for days until the image of a scientist horrified by the creature he had brought to life came to her. Byron's doctor, John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre in the same contest. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus first appeared in three volumes, just 500 copies, with a preface by Percy. Her name was first printed on it in a French translation of 1821 and, in Britain, in the second edition of 1823. It is often called one of the first science-fiction novels.

Literary historyRead card
WonderLiterature

George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, gave English terms still used for surveillance and propaganda: Big Brother, the Thought Police, Newspeak and doublethink, the habit of believing two contradictory things at once. The adjective “Orwellian” came later.

Orwell wrote most of the novel on Jura, a remote Scottish island, while seriously ill with tuberculosis. It was published on 8 June 1949, and he died seven months later, aged 46. Its hero, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspapers so that the past always agrees with the Party. Newspeak is the Party's shrunken language, designed to make rebellious thoughts impossible to express, and Big Brother is the leader whose face watches from every poster. The earliest known use of “Orwellian” is by the American writer Mary McCarthy in 1950; the word now describes any system built on surveillance, propaganda and the denial of plain facts. Big Brother also gave its name to a reality television show, first broadcast in the Netherlands in 1999.

Literary historyRead card
Next card in the archiveMary Shelley began Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, when she was 18, after a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley by Lake Geneva. The novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20.Read next →