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Showing posts from June, 2021

Kawabata Yasunari: Beauty and Sadness・from 'Early Spring' chapter

“ ...he had always read  The Tale of Genji  in the small type of modern editions, but when he came across it in a handsome old block-printed edition it made an entirely different impression on him. What had it been like when they read it in those beautiful flowing manuscripts of the age of the Heian Court? A thousand years ago  The Tale of Genji  was a modern novel. It could never be read that way again, no matter how far  Genji  studies progressed. Still, the old edition gave a more intense pleasure than a modern one. Doubtless the same would be true of Heian poetry.”   ―  Yasunari  Kawabata ,  Beauty and Sadness   Kawabata Yasunari  川端康成  (1899−1972) 美しさと哀しみと  Utsukushisa to kanashimi to Translated by Howard S. Hibbett (1920 −2019)