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Tertiary sourceBook1925–1933

The Sacred Tree

Arthur Waley · 1925–1933

The dust jacket of part two of Arthur Waley's influential 1925–33 English translation of The Tale of Genji, which spread Murasaki Shikibu's fame worldwide.

Waley's translation made Murasaki Shikibu's novel known to the wider world.

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Dust jacket of the book The Sacred Tree by Lady Murasaki, translated by Arthur Waley, published by Houghton Mifflin. The spine reads The Tale of Genji Part II and shows a ship in an oval. The front cover has a framed line drawing of a courtier seated in a veranda beside a carriage, with a pine tree in the foreground.
Arthur Waley (trans.), The Sacred Tree (The Tale of Genji, Part II), Houghton Mifflin, 1925–1933.

About this source

What it is

This is the dust jacket of The Sacred Tree, the second part of Arthur Waley's six-volume English translation of The Tale of Genji, published between 1925 and 1933 by Houghton Mifflin. The cover shows a line drawing of a courtier seated on a veranda beside a carriage, with a pine tree nearby.

Why it matters

Waley's translation introduced Murasaki Shikibu's 11th-century novel to a huge new audience and helped make her a figure of world literature, studied far beyond Japan.

Look closer

  • What choices might a translator make when turning an 11th-century Japanese text into English for 1920s readers?
  • What does the cover artwork suggest about how the book was being presented to Western readers?
  • Why might a translation change how a historical figure is remembered internationally?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Murasaki Shikibu on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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